Radhe - Your Most Wanted Bhai Review: The NCB Drug Case News Coverage Was More Entertaining Than Salman Khan’s Film

This Eid , Salman Khan has a lot of commitments to keep. The star is back to business as Radhe Your Most Wanted Bhai is finally delivered to the audiences at their homes as promised. In the Prabhu Deva film, Salman has another commitment to keep, which is to rid the city of Mumbai of its growing drug problem.

An unruly cop, Radhe is a legend in the police department with 97 encounters and 23 transfers to his name. His legendary status can be explained by his quite literal smashing entry. Salman shatters the glass of on a certain floor of a high-rise building (with no harness of course) and zooms in like the Flash to bring a rapist to justice, all for the women kind.

 His suspension is revoked when a drug lord Rana, played by Randeep Hooda , aims to expand his drug sales by targeting school and college kids and deaths due to consumption pile on.

The Eid offering is one of Salman Khan’s shortest movies, just shy of two hours of run time. The story moves between the too many to count action sequences where Salman does what he’s best at – throw punches with all his swagger and make the bad guys quake. As for the story itself, there isn’t much to go with, but stumbling from one distraction to another we finally get there - the action filled hero villain climax, quintessential to all Salman films.

Disha Patani in the film can be termed as one such distraction. The actress plays Diya who is Radhe’s love interest and his boss’s sister. Interestingly, Radhe meets Diya not long after him killing a rapist and his 20 odd men for the welfare of women kind as he said, but after seeing her, morals be dead. He stalks her in the street for a while and lies to her to get a lift in her car and to get her phone number.

Disha has a sizable role in the movie none of which significantly leads the plot anywhere but exists because all Salman movies have a touch of romance. Jackie Shroff , plays Disha’s brother who walks in promising good things but isn't given enough to deliver.

Coming to the crux of the film – Radhe and Rana have multiple face-offs and no dialogue exchanges except for one. Randeep keeps up his end by playing a menacing drug lord and his cut to the action relationship with Radhe is quite a reprieve from the heavy dialogue exchanges which are saved for the others. Though the cat and mouse chase between Salman and Randeep also seems tiring after a beat as the drug lord isn’t working as hard at hiding as the police are working at trying to trace him.

The action choreography takes the cake in Radhe and Prabhu Deva did not fail in using it to the advantage of the film as far a screen time goes. While many of the bad guys in the film are rather aimless including debutants Gautam Gulati, Sangay and Arjun Kanungo, Salman Khan had done a promising job at fighting each one, Wanted style. The movie might not be a sequel but it certainly has a certain recall value to the film that essentially launched the Salman Khan genre of films in 2009.

Take the action away, Radhe might fail to even pass as a poor comedy. The jokes are rather bland like Jackie Shroff introducing himself as a ‘two’ dangerous cop. A promising comic talent like Siddhartha Jadav has rather pointlessly been cast in the film. Even Jackie in a satin dress dancing in Salman’s arms might not entice you enough to laugh here.

Radhe, overall, looks like a mass employment scheme during the pandemic, where several known faces make an appearance with very little to add next to Salman’s larger-than-life persona. After having seen the Narcotics Control Bureau take charge of sweeping Mumbai clean of drugs last year with many Bollywood celebrity names getting dragged into the matter, Radhe seems paler in comparison to even the exaggerated news coverage around the NCB case despite the action galore.