Director: Rajkumar Hirani
Writers: Abhijat Joshi, Rajkumar Hirani, Kanika Dhillon
Stars: Shah Rukh Khan, Taapsee Pannu, Vicky Kaushal
Synopsis: Four friends from a village in Punjab share a common dream: to go to England. Their problem is that they have neither the visa nor the ticket. A soldier promises to take them to the land of their dreams.
2023 is the year of Shah Rukh Khan. While American cinema was in complete shambles with its first dual actors/writers strike in sixty years, the Baadshah of Bollywood successfully came back from the nadir of his career in Pathaan (while also briefly appearing as the same character in Tiger 3, a reunion of sorts with Fan director Maneesh Sharma), Jawan, and now Dunki. Teaming up with Rajkumar Hirani, best-known for helming two of Aamir Khan’s finest pictures in 3 Idiots and PK, the film is as politically blunt as Khan’s previous efforts and examines the migrant crisis through the lens of Hardy Singh Dhillon (Khan), who leads a group of friends on the “Donkey flight” (AKA Dunki) from Punjab to London hoping for a better life.
The first half of the film is its weakest part, adopting an overtly comedic tone that typically feels Hirani, but also can’t find a balance between the more serious, heavy-handed themes he wants to discuss and the light-hearted nature of the characters. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any jokes that work: one in particular is the funniest piece of dark humor I’ve seen in ages, and the “English Exam” sequence had me in stitches. But after that exam scene, a drastic shift in tone and atmosphere occurs that, while striking and raw, felt like it belonged in another movie. It is a powerful scene, only due to Vicky Kaushal embodying his character with so much anguish and despair. Still, it would’ve benefited from occurring later in the film, where the tone gets grimmer and more direct in examining its subject matter.
The pace is also incredibly languishing. It takes over half of the 161-minute runtime to get things in motion. It spends lots of its introductory moments with its lead protagonists going from one scheme to the next in an attempt to get a Visa, only for these moments to backfire spectacularly. It’s designed to showcase the characters at their most vulnerable, with Hardy acting as their heroic figure. Still, Hirani takes a much longer time in approaching the story than he did in a film like 3 Idiots, where he immediately sets the tone from its opening scene and never lets up from there, finding a perfect balance between side-splitting comedy and massive amounts of heart in its core story.
However, the aforementioned Kaushal scene is the catalyst for the events that cause Hardy to accompany Manu (Taapsee Pannu), Balli (Anil Grover), and Buggu (Vikram Kochhar) on the Dunki, with a few other residents of the town who long for a more hopeful life in London. And that’s where the movie begins to reveal itself as a powerful piece of work from Hirani and SRK’s best dramatic performance since My Name Is Khan.
Funnily enough, ever since that movie, Khan has been keen on examining his façade in the public eye through the artifice of cinema more than he did in his anti-hero and romantic eras. In my opinion, SRK’s self-reflexive era has been his most artistically interesting, even if the released films weren’t particularly acclaimed or perfect. In Sharma’s Fan, Khan took the dual role of the movie star and the (de-aged) obsessive admirer, fully examining his stardom’s effects on the masses and how he deals with an ever-growing (and ever-raging) fanbase. Just look at how some of his stan accounts create social media campaigns to posit Prashanth Neel’s Salaar: Part One – Ceasefire (which stars one of India’s biggest actors, Prabhas, and opened on the same day as Dunki) as an unmitigated disaster and encourage audiences to support Dunki instead (the Prabhas fanbase is doing the same with the hashtag #DunkiDisaster). No wonder why some didn’t like it.
Even his worst film, Zero, saw Khan attempt to examine himself through a different lens by using CGI (and de-aging, once again) to shrink himself and play a dwarf. The results were disastrous and saw the biggest box office bomb of his entire career. But that didn’t stop him from being less introspective, as his last film, Jawan, was probably his most self-reflexive effort yet, operating as a “Greatest Hits” vehicle of some of his best attributes as an action star, romantic star, anti-hero, and dramatic powerhouse, while also directly calling out the institutions of power for their inaction at getting things done and asking audiences to reflect on their vote before casting it. It’s perhaps the gutsiest thing he ever did, but no one else would’ve dared to say what he said. That’s why he did it.
Khan doesn’t owe anyone anything. He’s already on the top. He had to reclaim his throne after Zero, but once Pathaan obliterated box office records (with Jawan following suit), he was back on it as if he had never left. That’s why he continues to examine himself through different iterations of Hardy, from the charming (de-aged) young boy arriving in Punjab to repay a debt to the soldier leading the gang to London and the older, gruff Hardy looking to reunite with his friends to bring them home. There’s a bit of jingoism in his portrayal(s) of the same character through different eras, especially during a scene where he pleads to a judge on granting asylum by attempting to convince him that the system is the cause of their woes and not their country.
He’s not entirely wrong. The system in place is forcing many immigrants to cross borders illegally because it grants visas based on their academic and professional experience, leaving many lower-class people to resort to extreme measures for a better life, putting their safety and future at risk, but the ones in power who rule the country put these laws in place, which creates the system. That’s where Hirani inserts a montage of real images of migrants illegally crossing the border, which are too disturbing to describe here.
But his approach feels oddly manipulative, just like when Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom used real-life footage of children being kidnapped, not in an attempt to raise awareness, but to add dramatic tension into the romanticized tellings of Tim Ballard’s (Jim Caviezel) raid. The use of real-life footage in Dunki happens after a pivotal scene, where Hardy reunites with Manu for the first time in twenty-five years. While the scene itself is emotionally devastating, the cut to black into text that showcases the real problem of the migrant crisis feels unnecessarily disingenuous because the audience is already crying. It’s as if Hirani chose this specific moment to make audiences cry more because the problem is real, instead of raising awareness within the film’s diegesis or through the figure of SRK, who knows how to make audiences care about things he feels are personal to him.
Unexpectedly, SRK’s acting is phenomenal. His various monologues are impassioned, but using his eyes is the most impressive thing about his versatility, especially in this film. The torment he feels after saving Manu’s life from one of the film’s most difficult scenes is a look that will stay with me for a long time, or the realization that the two will be separated for the next two decades is another facial expression that only the ageless presence of Shah Rukh Khan could ever pull off. He shares magnifying chemistry with Pannu, who gives the most moving turn of her career in a role wrought with so much emotional complexity that she’s bound to eventually break all of our hearts (which she does in many sequences).
But it’s ultimately because Khan posits himself as an actor who keeps rethinking how he approaches his multiple façades on the screen that makes Dunki worth a watch. Lord knows if his next roles will adopt the same posture he did with Jawan and Dunki, as he recently teased wanting to play an “age-real” character. He is, after all, nearing 60, but still looks as charming as he did when he charmed all of our hearts in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Still, I’ll be here to watch whatever he does next, no matter what type of film it will be because he is one of the few actors who can still sell a film just by being in it. No one has that kind of pull in Hollywood nowadays.
