Is Jawan a good film worth watching? If you even dare to ask this question, then you obviously aren’t the target audience of this movie. Jawan is like the highlights package of a T20 game shorn of all superficialities of story, progression, and characterization, with every second of its running length devoted to creating a religious experience for devotees of the religion of Shahrukh Khan.

Trying to analyze or review Jawan like it is a movie is to miss the point. Just like blind belief cannot be rationalized, so is Jawan impervious to deconstruction using the conventional parameters of judging cinema. And this is through careful design, Attlee and Red Chillies have figured out that the target audience is not interested in seeing Shahrukh Khan in anything where he is a mortal. If they did, then Zero or Fan or Dear Zindagi or When Harry Met Sejal would have made the kind of money that a Shahrukh Khan movie is expected to make.

In a post-Covid world of low-cost streaming, a movie made to conventional standards, by itself, cannot bring butts into seats at scale. Why bother when I can watch it in a few weeks, legally at home?

But a religious experience can.

And that precisely is Jawan.

Jawan follows the following template: Shahrukh Khan enters, the camera pans up, Shahrukh Khan breaks the fourth wall and delivers dialog to the audience, Shahrukh Khan bashes generic villains to a pumping background track, Shahrukh Khan smiles, rinse and repeat. Shahrukh Khan has no weaknesses; whatever obstacles there are in the hero’s journey are resolved within a few seconds, as if there is a countdown clock, after which the devotee may start to feel angry that the divinity of their God is being challenged. To his credit, Shahrukh Khan looks like a God, especially the older character, and if there is anything that is truly divine, it is how he has maintained his physique at his age, when for most other actors of his generation, doing a role like this would have given off late-career Dev Anand vibes. Not Shahrukh Khan; he looks prime, and in his prime, and without that physical perfection, Jawan would have been a parody.

Which it is not. Jawan is a perfectly engineered product in that it connects the customer with their needs, giving them what they truly want and not what they think they want.

I realized, as I left the cinema theater, that my being not a devotee, or at least not one anymore (I used to cosplay as Ramjaane in the 90s), I was not really the target audience. This is why, during the movie itself, my mind went to other things—like the inspirations from not just “Money Heist” but also the old Shahrukh Khan movie “Army” except here Shahrukh Khan was both Shahrukh Khan as well as Sridevi, and why they did not develop the back stories of all the “girls” in Azad’s Army, given that they started and then seemed to abandon that theme, possibly because it might make devotees feel the absence of God in the current time. I mean, I was hoping that the hacker’s backstory was that she was duped of her life savings by a shady ed-tech whose brand ambassador was this….Oh, I think I now know why not all of them have backstories.

The other thing that my mind vacillated to was how terribly underwhelming the villain was, despite the powerhouse actor playing it. It seemed, once again, that the makers are afraid of making anyone else, go toe-to-toe in a meaningful way with the divinity that is at the core of the experience. But, to the one for whom the movie is made, such thoughts of inspiration and “how many times I have seen this before” are blasphemous and will not enter, and if they enter, you are in the wrong place at a screening of Jawan.

Besides, of course, the drug that is religion, there is that of politics. Hindi movies have traditionally stayed clear of referring to current political events, especially if that runs counter to the narrative of the dominant party, be it Congress or BJP. It was fairly evident from the pre-release hype that Jawan, with its Tamil director Attlee, where movies are more political and “anti-Brahminical”, would buck the trend because his “anti-establishment” temper is like the Telegraph newspaper’s, they can be provocative to the party at the center because the ruling dispensation where they operate is on their side. Given that the INDIA alliance finds that the airwaves have been closed to them by virtue of the BJP government’s hold on news channels, their political propaganda being written into a major blockbuster might have been a messaging game-changer for the next elections.

If there indeed is a bigger brand than Modi today, it is Shahrukh Khan’s.

Jawan tries. It definitely says that Kafeel Khan was framed when it came to the oxygen cylinders running out in Yogiji’s UP, and it definitely is in alignment with Rahul Gandhi’s talking points on loans and farmers. The villain is made to look like Modi (in the 90s, there were movies where Paresh Rawal played a Lalloo Yadav lookalike) and is given Modi lines like “Waah kya scene hai.” The “Bete ko haath lagane se pahele baap se baat kaar“, lands the best because it ties into the travails of Shahrukh Khan, the person, and because it is delivered in the exact right way, by one of the last remaining Bollywood superstars who know what true dialogue-baazi is.

But in terms of landing the killer political blow, it falters. So eager is Attlee to move onto the next Shahrukh Khan sequence that he does not let the emotional impact of his political messaging when it is at its most strident, settle in. When Shahrukh Khan delivers the climactic fourth-wall-breaking speech, it is a very generic message, emotional yet unifying, anodyne in that it is universally populist, far short of what would have made political dynamite for 2024. One can see very clearly a divergence of voice between that of Shahrukh Khan and that of Attlee, one who has fans and businesses across jurisdictions wherein he needs to keep everyone happy, and the other who spouts hot air in a state where he is sheltered from any fallout. And it is this divergence that prevents Jawan from becoming what Mahua Moitra and Jairam Ramesh would have hoped for it to be.

But for most of Jawan’s audience, none of this is of any importance. It is a direct connection with a God-like being, where he will speak to his devotees directly, where everything else, the characters and the story are like ceremonial lamps that exist only to establish the halo.

If you walk into the theater to experience devotion of the purest form, to peal out in joyous rapture with fellow devotees, Jawan does not disappoint.

For the uninitiated, the skeptical and the rational, your mileage may vary.

But honestly, you do not matter.

Jawan is not for you.