Another Eid, and like clockwork, there’s another Salman Khan biggie out on screens. This time, the star has reteamed with director Kabir Khan—the man who had helmed two of the actor’s more recent hits in the form of 2012’s Ek Tha Tiger and 2015’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan—to bring to us the new Tubelight, a reworking of a 2015 Hollywood anti-war drama, Little Boy. Tubelight takes that poorly-received story of a young child’s desperate desire to bring his father home from the battlefield in World War II and repurposes it to fit the context of the Indo-Sino War in 1962.

However, while the shift in setting is achieved smoothly enough, and the film’s overall message about inclusion and tolerance is both timely and well-intentioned, it is in execution that Tubelight, in a manner reminiscent of one of its own much-derided knock-kneed characters, trips, fails wildly and tumbles face-first to the ground.

Rather than the feel-good lesson on the power of “belief” that it seeks to be, this slow-moving, synthetic and incredibly simplistic excuse for a film will feel, by the time you reach end credits, more like a brutal test of the power of your patience. 

Ever since he’d been a child, Laxman (Khan) had, by his own admission, been a little slow on the general uptake, earning him the unimaginative moniker of “tubelight” from his ever-sneering contemporaries. Fortunately, younger brother Bharat (Sohail Khan) has always had his back, fighting off the bullies and—more so owing to the early loss of their parents—basically hand-holding Laxman through his travails in life.

Until the day the army arrives in their picturesque little town in the Kumaon hills, and calls upon the young men therein to enlist in order to stop the potential Chinese encroachment along the border.

Bharat aces the tests and is almost immediately drafted, and so he heads off, leaving behind a distraught and utterly helpless Laxman.

It should come as no spoiler that the entire point of a story such as this one is to show our hero gradually coming into his own, learning to rely on himself and demonstrating his worth to an otherwise dismissive society.

Playing a major part in that evolution in this case is a friendship Laxman strikes with a little boy (Matin Rey Tangu) and his mother (Zhu Zhu) who have just moved into the neighbourhood, and whose distinctive appearance—they’re Indian, but their ancestors were from China—earns them instant ill will. Laxman, then, finds himself caught between defending the pair, and the prospect of losing his only brother to Chinese forces—and struggling not to conflate the two, as his fellow townspeople have so easily done.  

The attempt to say something, anything, about distrustful and often downright discriminatory attitudes and behaviour towards people from the North-East in India, 

particularly at this point in time, is appreciable, as is Tubelight’s general celebration of the values of friendship and humanism over those of blind, brute nationalism.

But the presentation of these ideas is puerile to the extreme, more a page out of a sixth grade Moral Science book than a film that isn’t targeted—at least not to my knowledge—specifically at under-12s. Indeed, that sense of having one’s intelligence underestimated lingers throughout—particularly when the kindly Banne Chacha, played by the late Om Puri, is giving Laxman a crash course on Gandhian ideals, scenes that are so over-earnest, they make you cringe.

That’s the trouble with the constant sermonising in Tubelight—it’s too dumbed down to really evoke any sort of response, essentially just a load of numbing noise. 

Another major contributor to the film’s overall manufactured, inauthentic air is—and hardcore Salman fans can opt out from reading here on out—the lead performance, possibly the weakest link, and very possibly Khan’s worst avatar to date.

For a long time now, the actor has been coasting on roles that involve very little “acting” per se, mostly big-budget vehicles where it seems he only needs to show up, shake a leg or two, spout a few dramatic put-downs, in between taking on relentless action set-pieces—and if it hasn’t earned him the love of critics, it’s been more than enough for his legions of admirers.

One can’t really blame him, though, for wanting to try something different, partly to distance his public image from that distinct brand of shirtless machismo he’s long been peddling—a desire that’s increasingly crept into his most recent outings on screen.

But what he does in Tubelight is a misfire of epic proportions: For one, although it’s never expressly told how old Laxman is, it’s still stretching belief a quite bit to have him played by a 50-something actor.

And Khan, seemingly channeling Hrithik Roshan’s already-questionable portrayal of an adult man with a developmental disability in Koi...Mil Gaya, botches this stint so bad it’s actually hard to watch, especially when he’s trying to come off all childlike and innocent, or even worse, when crumpling his face up to shed some tears.

Never, ever, have the actor’s limitations been more evident than they are here, and not once do you believe in his ridiculous caricature of a character. In fact, everyone, including real-life brother Sohail Khan, who, let’s admit, isn’t the heftiest of performers by any other account, and the diminutive Tangu, who is basically given to alternating between cutesy posturing and yelling his lines—are still a vast improvement on Khan.

One of the few positives in Tubelight is the incredible scenery that it captures, shot in various locations around north India, including Manali. However, when we zoom into the little settlement where Laxman lives, with its overly-colourful houses and characters, there’s an artificial quality to the wholesome small-town camaraderie on display, a little too perfect, a little too practiced to truly feel real.

If I were you, I’d skip this one. Then again, given that Khan’s films are, by his own estimation, “critic-proof”, if you’re a fan, you probably won’t take my advice.