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4 Years of Kick: What made this Salman Khan film a BLOCKBUSTER?

Published on July 25, 2018

Salman Khan, after the failure of the emotionally barren Jai Ho, starred in Sajid Nadiadwala’s directorial debut, Kick, in the same year, 2014. The actor, too lazy and laid-back to lay his hands on something even close to being entirely original, was cast in an another remake of a South Indian potboiler of the same name. And after multiple successes, why wouldn’t Salman want to cannibalize his stardom with a script that hardly demands anything of him?

But unlike the original Kick, the scale of the remake was enlarged, the locations bigger and the action as unbelievable as it can get! And when you have Sajid Nadiadwala as your producer and director, you may not worry about the plot as much as you ponder on how massive the canvas of the film would be! These staples could be one of the major reasons why Kick worked with the audiences, a larger-than-life leading man in some larger-than-life locations.

Another factor that worked in the makers’ favor was to tap into the humane side of Khan, which was also exploited in Jai Ho but the tears and the screams in that Sohail Khan directorial were incessantly manipulative and too cacophonous to leave you choked or invested. Subtlety is surely not visible in Bhai’s films, but somehow when he weeps in Kick, you strangely feel for him and even the child he’s crying for.

But Nadiadwala didn’t forget to exploit the actor’s persona either! So we had multiple slo-mo shots, montages of the actor staring at the camera with blankness, cluelessness and yet making an impression. And of course, romancing Jacqueline Fernandez in a song sung (or auto-tuned) by him called Hangover and dancing the way only he can on Jumme Ki Raat.

Crowd favorite? Nawazuddin Siddiqui playing the bad guy called Shiv Gajra. He revels in mercilessly killing people and talks with a hysterically obnoxious laughter derived from Manoj Bajpayee’s Aks. When asked the actor about his reason to do a film largely dominated by Bhai, he stated it was a role he said yes to without even reading the script as it gave him an opportunity to veer into the space of glitz, glamour and style.