Main Hoon Na

Major Ram Prasad Sharma is sent undercover into a college as a student on a secret assignment: to protect a general's daughter. He also has a job that is not his mission, which is to find the other son of the father who left years ago, his half-brother. The subject is not action but family. Ram's real problem is neither the terrorist nor the school but getting his mother and brother to accept him. The action strand exists to carry the emotional one and the two are deliberately laid over each other. The form is an open salute to Indian cinema of the seventies: the palette, the arrangement of songs and the character types all imitate that era. Farah Khan had worked for years as a choreographer, and in this first film as a director the dance sections become the narration itself. One scene refers directly to The Matrix, and quotations like it are left deliberately visible; the narrative assumes the audience recognises them. Shah Rukh Khan plays Ram, Sushmita Sen the chemistry teacher and Suniel Shetty the antagonist. Zayed Khan plays the half-brother. Who it is for: viewers who like mainstream Indian cinema of the 2000s and genre mixing. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone; the film jumps from comedy to action to melodrama.