Shahrukh Khan. The young, gawky, painfully intense boy with big brown, melting eyes who came from nowhere and became an empire. Didn’t we love this story almost as much as we loved him?  He was Raju who came to Mumbai to become a gentleman and became instead a superman. We did not love him because he was the greatest of actors. He has the grating titter remember? His voice was not resonant. We loved him because he made us feel. Whether it was love or fear or pain or rage, he took us with him into the heart of the emotion. From the gawky Raju who came to a big city to become ‘someone,’ to Raj who was ‘the one,’ to G.One, it has been a journey that we have witnessed whether we loved him, were indifferent to him or disliked him.

There was something about Shahrukh Khan that was bigger than him, that was not manipulated or manufactured. He was someone with an immense capacity to feel joy and pain. Is he still that someone? Or does he just fake it and feel a rush of blood only when he is suspended mid air from cables and is pretending to stop a local train like Spiderman? Where is that raw, bristling energy he invested in us, in his roles?

There is a great line in Ra.One, one of the few that says how superheroes are not made of metal or steel but are great because of their ‘dil.’ That is what we  believed about Shahrukh. That he felt life more intensely than us all. Whether he was chasing his would-be wife across the beaches of Mumbai or coming all the way to Punjab to find his Simran, he was all heart.

Ironically, Ra.One revolves around the notion of a heart being intrinsic to both evil and goodness and yet there is an absence of just that in the film. Sure, there is a naive and simple father who gets occasionally poignant. A wife (Kareena Kapoor who flits from hysteria, to dignity to a burst of induced villainy, looking beautiful in a wardrobe that was perhaps given more thought than the lines she gets to speak) who mourns a shattering loss. A son who realises the value of a father too late and yet these moments get lost in the melee of nothingness.

How much thought could have gone into the script where in the middle of a life and death battle, the hero grabs the “main part”  of the villain and the villain (Arjun Rampal who has just one great line,“Tum Ravan ko har saal iss liye jalate ho kyonki tum jaante ho ki woh kabhi nahin marta.”) who is supposed to strike icy fear in your heart asks, “Yeh tum kya kar rahe ho?”  Or when our hero flashes a pierced nipple while another man salivates? There are many such moments where the intent is to just crack a dirty joke and get by.

The movie is a not unlike an inside joke that we feel excluded from. Watch the scene at the airport where Shahrukh’s close friend and writer Mushtaq Sheikh appears as a hoodlum and again the “main part” joke appears and a kick sends him reeling. Really, is this a  congenital problem, this need to go below the belt? Dare we say that without each other Farah Khan and Shahrukh somehow miss the hilarity chip that  infused life in less than perfect scripts like Main Hoon Na and Om Shanti Om? The one moment where Shahrukh  played a superhero to save Malaika Arora in Om Shanti Om was funnier than the  painfully long sequence where he makes his first appearance to rescue the intolerable Desi Girl (Priyanka Chopra) from Khalnayak Sanjay Dutt. And the three Lee girls? Uski, Isski, Sabki? Really?

The people who wrote this film have no sense of humour and no intelligence if they can in this age of informed correctness, come up with a geek who wears a curly hair wig and says ‘aiyyo‘ to convince us that he is a Tamilian. Curd with noodles? Again, really? There was a premise that could have worked. A story of fear and foreboding, good and evil, danger and death and resurrection, revenge and redemption. Shahrukh as G.One looks spectacular in a superhero suit, has a clinically sharp, aware body language but even in this avatar, he is made to thrust his pelvis repeatedly in a power yoga joke.

He is a star still. Oh, you can’t take that away from the man. Even in Ra.One, when he is running next to a train or swinging to an Akon song, we realise just how charismatic he is, someone  who just needs to look intently at the camera to make you skip a heart beat. Someone angular, chiselled, no longer frumpy even when he is trying hard to but you also see that he no longer thinks of himself as an actor but as a brand selling itself.

And that really is the biggest problem with this film. It depends too much on Khan’s past equity and is ambitious in budget but not in intent. Vishal Shekhar’s music is zesty with an Akon show stopper, one RD Burman inspired theme track and some leisurely, simmering  songs. The effects are exceptional even though their reference points may come from many super hero films. The Ganesha idol moment at the Chattrapati Shivaji Terminal and Rajnikant’s cameo are crowd pleasing but in a world where a film like Bodyguard does business worth 100 crore, maybe those who make films know that they need not aspire to greatness anymore.

By that yardstick, Ra.One is a world-class film. The only sad thing is if it had a  director committed to telling a solid story without distractions, it may well have been. But it is Shahrukh who needs to go back to the actor he once was. To the man who did not need to wear a rubber suit to convince us that he was a super hero.

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