Like Malayalam film Take Off, will Salman Khan’s Tiger Zinda Hai do justice to the real heroes of the tale?

The answer is simple: It is a Salman Khan film. What more can we expect from a film that is solely made to serve the larger-than-life onscreen image of a self-indulgent protagonist?

The real-life story of involving 46 nurses, who were taken hostages by the ISIS group in Iraq in 2014 is clearly only a prelude for writer-director Ali Abbas Zafar to create a dramatic situation so that Tiger can single-handedly (mostly) take down the ISIS empire with a handful of big guns. Bollywood using stories of courage and human triumph to serve the stardom of its lead actors, while undermining the inspiring journey of real heroes, is not a surprise. But, my quarrel with Tiger Zinda Hai is for a different reason.

A day after the trailer of Tiger Zinda Hai released, a media report quoted director Mahesh Narayan’s plans to drop the Hindi remake of his Malayalam blockbuster Take Off. The filmmakers shelved the project as both the films dealt with similar incidents.

The Malayalam blockbuster that released earlier this year had a gripping narrative and performances by the cast, which made it a memorable and powerful film that filled our screens with characters of strong-willed women. The upcoming Hindi film is more about the size of the ego in Salman’s character and less about the lives of the Indians which were at the stake.

Take Off became a big hit commercially and critically down south. But, Tiger Zinda Hai has seemingly taken away the opportunity from the Malayalam film to reach bigger and wider screens in other parts of the country. The Salman Khan film, in fact, deprived the Hindi film audiences of a powerful cinema with beautiful performances that could have done justice to its “based on real-life incidents” tag.