Mercifully, Sultan isn’t all bull. But as a sports film, it does not quite take the genre by the horns and deliver a product unsullied by the conventions of a Bollywood potboiler.
One of Sultan Ali Khan’s key takeaways from the ring is that wrestling isn’t just a sport. It is a bout that one fights with life.
It takes an awful amount of time and endless bone-crunching for that realization to dawn upon him.
From the audience’s point of view, the cliched life lessons that the film offers are borderline passable. The length of the film - 170 minutes - isn’t.
Sultan, written and directed by Abbas Ali Zafar, may have been designed to pull Salman Khan away from his comfort zone, but, in the ultimate analysis, it is just another bloated affair that rides on the bluster and bombast typical of a film featuring the superstar.
Salman Khan is after all a genre unto himself. It matters little whether he is in a sports drama or in a mish-mash of flighty romance and high-voltage action - Sultan is a bit of both.