Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) Review: Salman’s Warmest Cross-Border Crowd-Pleaser

Is Bajrangi Bhaijaan worth watching?

Yes, if you want Hindi cinema at its most openly emotional — Celluloid rates it Recommended after our Bollywood reliability pass. Editorial warmth (88) outruns Metascore (72) and Letterboxd (3.7/5); the 92% audience snapshot and 8.1 IMDb stay display-weighted so the composite does not chase fan inflation. Four-input Celluloid Score: 72%.

Kabir Khan’s film runs 159 minutes in Hindi. On Celluloid we file it with Comedy and Drama peers from India because it remains a primary “Salman Khan family film” search target alongside Sultan.

Faith as logistics

What Bajrangi Bhaijaan understands is that Salman Khan’s screen persona works best when the plot treats him as a stubborn courier rather than a vigilante. Pawan’s Hanuman-bhakti is not a sermon so much as a GPS: he will walk a mute Pakistani girl (Harshaali Malhotra) across a border because a promise was made. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s journalist is the film’s pressure valve — he punctures the piety without mocking the feeling. When the film works, it is because the set pieces (the cricket-crowd sequence, the final village run) are staged as communal events, not as star poses.

Where the sermon overreaches

The India–Pakistan framing is cartoon-simple, and Kareena Kapoor Khan is asked to wait at the edge of a story that barely needs a romantic subplot. Celluloid’s score reflects that split: critic goodwill and Letterboxd affection for a crowd-pleaser, not a political document. Watch it for the child performance and Salman’s unguarded register; do not expect the border to survive a pause button.

Verdict

Bajrangi Bhaijaan is the Salman film to start with if you have only seen the action brand. It is long, wet-eyed, and occasionally clumsy — and it still earns the recommendation because it believes, without irony, that getting a child home is enough plot.