For a long time in the middle part of the last decade, he was beginning to fade from the public's good graces following a number of terrible missteps in his personal life and disappointing performances at the box office. The man who was India's Sylvester Stallone, churning out hit after hit, had turned into India's Dolph Lundgren, once a big star, now languishing in mediocre film purgatory. That all changed in 2009 with Prabhu Deva's Wanted, a stylish, over the top action masala film that landed Salman Khan firmly back on top of the Bollywood heap.
That film, released on Eid of 2009, began a streak of hits that no one in Bollywood has been able to match. While big stars like Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan end up with hits most of the time, Salman's last three Eid releases, Wanted, Dabangg, and Bodyguard; have been box office gold, and broken collections records consistently. This year, Salman Khan teams up with director Kabir Khan (no, everyone in Bollywood is not named Khan), for Ek Tha Tiger.
Ek Tha Tiger, which translates roughly as There Once Was a Tiger, is the latest in Salman's series of testosterone driven masala entertainers to open on Eid, hoping to cement his position as the king of that holiday. Last year several films dropped out of the Eid release weekend to make way for Bodyguard, and wisely so, as the film broke all box office opening records.
Director and writer Kabir Khan is best known for his Afghanistan set drama Kabul Express and his post-9/11 take on racial profiling in America, New York. The latter wasn't very action packed, but the former was pretty well received. The trailer doesn't give us much actual footage, even though the film has been shooting for several months, however, the last few seconds certainly let us know what to expect from Salman Khan in the action department.
Hopefully the film turns out better than Bodyguard, which was cute, but was also a South Indian remake, and terribly slight. Kabir Khan seems better than that, so I have some hope. Check out the first teaser for Ek Tha Tiger