It is futile to review a Salman Khan film. He defies the reasons why reviews are written.  After Wanted and  Dabangg and Ready, the template of a Salman hit has crystallised to include a few essentials. An unusual name. In the case of  the film in question, it is Lovely Singh. A signature dance move.  Biceps twitching musically, would you believe? A snappy one liner,“Mujh pe ek ehsaan karna..” you get the point. Atleast one moment where the shirt on his back gracefully gives away, leaving behind a camera friendly sea of ripples.

There are also the celebratory songs and dances extolling the many virtues of  everyone’s bhai jaan and the bodyguard of beautiful women who can jump off a speeding train and land on another, ram into a godown  where some young girls are being held against their will, run around bullets in circles, smash, lift, split foes as if they were Lego dolls and then walk out as if an honest day’s work was just beginning.

Argue with that if you can. Salman Khan today is not the wide-eyed, vulnerable actor you saw in Maine Pyar Kiya.  That lean, floppy haired, young man hungry for success. He is a monument and you don’t hold conversations with monuments. You watch them from a distance unquestioningly, taking in their scale, their grandeur. You don’t question their history. For instance, it is totally passe today to bring up that he was not too long ago, the bad boy of Hindi cinema, embroiled in serious law and disorder cases that left a black buck or two and a dead man in their wake.

Today he is over all that and so it seems, are we and even in a film as meaningless as Bodyguard, he is beyond reproach for his fans even though this role is challenging only because it requires Salman, now in his mid 40s,  to play Superman, Batman, Spiderman without the cape, the Batmobile and the Spidey suit. He can do anything, our Lovely Singh. And no, he is not required to act. All he has to do is wear cool shades and strut and hover around the absolutely lovely Divya (Kareena Kapoor) and say, “Yes madam..no madam” in an unflappable monotone and get into demolition mode when so much as a hair on her head is threatened by a passing wind or  a remote controlled helicopter, we kid you not.

The only time, we actually see Salman twitching with vulnerability is when he is waiting for a girl supposedly in love with him on a bridge or when he is checking himself out in a mirror self-consciously but this film is not about histrionics. It is about grand entries and dramatic exits, about a montage that introduces the heroine as if she were Yash Chopra’s Chandni and a one stop model for almond hair oil, buttery body lotions and skin whitening creams.

Yes, there are certain aspects of the 70s and 80s that we miss in our cinema. The naivety of romance for one and there is some of that in the film. But there are things we do not miss any more. The disjointed song inserts and parallel comedy tracks, in this case one revolving around an overweight somebody called Tsunami Singh (Rajat Rawail) who wears wigs and sneaks into girls’ hostels and is kicked and chased and stripped till we see him running for his life and ‘izzat‘ with his jiggling, natural and not so glorious, partially unclothed self. This comedy track is painful and crass, there we said the word, and utterly unnecessary. There is also a gay joke, the professor joke, the sultry maid joke and a joke around a tragically short person, just in case we need to be offended some more.

And since the idea of a dead woman narrating a flash back to her child and recounting a love found and lost has been seen in a different version in Karan Johar’s debut film, there really are no surprises to be expected in the screen play department either.

In an aside though, the fact that a restored heritage building in my home town Patiala was turned into Raj Babbar’s haveli made me feel nostalgic and Manish Malhotara’s luscious colours on Kareena Kapoor kept the eyes if not the mind engaged. There is also the beautiful Symbiosis University and an architecturally marvellous house with wispy curtains. My apologies for this digression but this is how you look for slim pickings when a film delivers no meat to sink your teeth into.

Hazel Keech  as the leading lady’s best friend is made to underplay her beauty, gets  just one moment to avenge herself but then disappears like the cell phone she throws into the grey yonder.  The music by Himesh Reshammiya is just another device to keep the actors busy between long stretches of nothingness and this South-Indian remake by Siddique is for fans who need nothing more than their Salman bhai jumping in and out of the loop holes in the script. So why did we write a redundant review again? For the same reason why the film was made. No particular reason at all.

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )