Salman Khan wears a mustache in Sultan that looks like it was glued on by someone standing across the room in a mild panic, and somehow that tiny, stubborn cosmetic choice tells you almost everything you need to know about the movie's weird, lurching commitment to middle-distance realism.

Ali Abbas Zafar directs this thing with the steady hand of a man who has watched too many sports docs on late-night cable and decided every single training montage needs to feel like an endurance test for the audience too, complete with tractor-tire flipping and dust kicked up into the lens until you can practically taste the grit between your teeth, though the editing occasionally stumbles over its own shoelaces when the match cuts don't quite match the momentum of the previous frame, leaving these awkward micro-pauses right before a throw where you can practically hear the stunt coordinator yelling action from just off-screen.

The screenplay takes a famously bloated template—the rise, fall, and redemptive comeback of a broken athlete—and stretches it across nearly three hours without ever really figuring out what to do with the middle thirty minutes except make Salman run up hills and look mournful in slow motion, which is fine, if I'm honest, because the man has always possessed a strange, heavy-lidded screen presence that doesn't require actual dialogue to register, just a willingness to let the camera linger on the back of his neck while he stares at a mud pit.

Anushka Sharma plays Aarfa, a wrestler whose sharpness cuts right through the usual Bollywood sugar, and she carries herself with an athletic arrogance that makes most of her male co-stars look like they're reading their lines off the back of a cereal box, especially during those early training sequences where she has to pretend she's not totally outclassing the writing handed to her by a roomful of guys who clearly hadn't spent much time around actual female athletes before typing out her monologues about self-respect and Haryana soil.

There's a supporting actor who plays Salman's loyal friend and cornerman, an older gentleman whose entire performance seems to have been dubbed in a broom closet three weeks after principal photography wrapped, and every single time he opens his mouth his lips move a full half-second after the audio hits, which isn't a dealbreaker, but it does make every emotional pep talk feel like an old kung fu import playing on a Sunday afternoon.

Vishal-Shekhar's soundtrack leans heavily on dhol beats and brass sections that feel borrowed from a dozen other sports dramas, yet the title track manages to punch through the fatigue whenever it drops, though the producers use the main theme song so frequently during the second half that you start to feel like you're being bludgeoned over the head with a very loud, very rhythmic rubber mallet every time Sultan so much as ties his shoes.

The cinematography by Vishal Sinha treats the wrestling akhada like a church, shooting the dirt and sweat with an amber glow that makes the physical violence look almost pastoral, though some of the digital color grading in the arena scenes turns the crowd into a blurry sea of purple pixels that wouldn't look out of place in a mid-budget video game from 2008.

Hindi films have always had a weird relationship with physical transformation, treating muscle gain as a moral achievement rather than just a fitness goal, and Sultan pushes this idea until it snaps, framing Salman's middle-aged flab and subsequent grueling weight loss as a literal penance for sins he hasn't even fully articulated to the audience yet, which turns what should be a straightforward sports redemption arc into this heavy, sluggish moral drama about male ego and local politics.

When Sultan loses his son, the film doesn't know how to handle the grief without sliding straight into melodrama, but Anushka keeps the scenes grounded by refusing to cry on cue, using this tight, pinched jaw instead that tells you everything about how women in these rural setups are expected to absorb tragedy without making a fuss.

There is an MMA sub-plot dragged in toward the end that feels entirely imported from a different movie, complete with foreign fighters who grunt like cartoon villains and an announcer whose commentary sounds like it was recorded on a cell phone in an empty corridor, and it ruins the mud-soaked authenticity that the first hour worked so hard to establish in those dusty Haryana alleys.

Salman doesn't stretch himself as an actor here, playing the same wounded-puppy tough guy he's been doing since the nineties, but there's a weariness to his performance this time around that actually works for a fading wrestler whose knees are giving out and whose marriage has dissolved into mutual stubbornness, reminding you of his work in Bajrangi Bhaijaan where he similarly let silence do the heavy lifting.

The film's ideology is a messy knot of traditionalism and modern female empowerment, having Aarfa preach gender equality one minute and then bench herself for motherhood the next, which is less a coherent theme and more a reflection of how commercial Hindi movies try to have it both ways without actually offending anyone in the family audience.

By the time the final grappling match rolls around, you already know every beat, every reversal, every slow-motion drop of sweat hitting the canvas, yet the sheer scale of the production keeps you watching through the predictable stretches, waiting for that one sharp look between the leads that reminds you why these two actors command the screen even when the plot is leaking water from every possible seam.

It is a long haul, full of redundant montages and loud songs that arrive right when the narrative is finally starting to breathe, but there's an earnest, heavy-footed honesty to its attempt at a sports epic that keeps it from sinking entirely under the weight of its own running time.