Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan attempts a much-anticipated comeback in “Pathaan,” an amateurish Indian super-spy thriller that’s never as well-executed as it is conceptually goofy and politically dubious.
“Pathaan” re-imagines Khan as the leader of a disjointed Avengers-style team of Hindi-language speaking action heroes from the “Yash Raj Films Spy Universe” franchise, so it’s not surprising that the beefy leading man Salman Khan makes a hotly tipped cameo appearance as Avinash Singh Rathore, the headliner in both the underwhelming antiterrorist drama “Ek Tha Tiger” and its superior follow-up, “Tiger Zinda Hai.”
It’s unfortunately telling that, in an overproduced action scene where both Shah Rukh and Salman run and gun down a swathe of badly image-composited terrorist heavies, neither man seems to be in the same studio lot as the other.