Salman Khan wears three different shades of tinted sunglasses in the first twenty minutes of Ek Tha Tiger, and if I'm honest, none of them do any favors for his forehead.
Kabir Khan directs with a heavy thumb on the steering wheel, pushing the narrative through Dublin and Istanbul and Cuba like a tired dad late for soccer practice, which works surprisingly well when the budget is exploding behind him and nobody has time to worry about logic.
The screenplay, credited to Kabir Khan and Neelesh Misra, borrows liberally from Bourne Identity without ever feeling the need to explain why an Indian intelligence operative is operating with zero oversight in foreign jurisdictions where local police apparently exist only to get knocked sideways into fruit carts.
There's a looseness to the dialogue that saves the heavy lifting from collapsing under its own gravity, even when the stakes are being whispered over encrypted comms that sound like they were recorded in a walk-in freezer.
Ranvir Shorey shows up as the weary handler who knows he is too old for this nonsense, dragging a cigarette through scenes where he has to look concerned about national security while clearly wishing he was anywhere else, and that specific world-weariness grounds the absurdity of the premise just enough to keep us from checking our watches.

Then Katrina Kaif enters the frame and the movie shifts gears completely, turning into a different kind of exercise where posture and lighting do most of the heavy lifting.
She plays Zoya with a strange, statuesque stiffness that works for a spy who is also a ballet dancer, though the film forgets she's a dancer for about forty-five minutes before suddenly remembering she can leap over a balcony.
Their chemistry isn't electric so much as magnetic in the fridge-door sense, pulling together because the script demands it rather than because the glances they share across crowded hotel lobbies suggest any real history.
Salman plays Tiger with his usual repertoire of sighs, shoulder rolls, and that specific dead-eyed stare that passes for intensity in modern Bollywood movies, rarely moving more muscles than absolutely necessary to dispatch three assassins at once.
Usha Uthup gets about two scenes as a friendly local contact who feeds him tea and exposition, delivering her lines with a raspy warmth that makes you wish the whole movie had just been about her running a safehouse in Dublin instead of this globe-trotting nonsense.
There is a recurring musical sting every single time Katrina pulls a pistol from her waistband that repeats so often it starts to sound like a faulty car alarm, and it's a small thing but it bugged me every damn time.

Aseem Mishra's cinematography loves a good blue filter, drenching every night scene in an icy wash that makes the warm-blooded romance feel like it's happening inside a commercial for high-end refrigerator units.
The action choreography by Aseem Mishra and Tony Ching handles the hand-to-hand stuff with a brutal economy that avoids the frantic shaky-cam of Dhoom 2, opting instead for wide angles where you can actually see Salman throw a punch that connects with someone's jaw.
Sohail Sen's soundtrack hits the standard beats with varying degrees of success, though the main theme has this insistent brass section that sounds suspiciously like a slowed-down version of the Mission Impossible cue if it had been arranged by someone who really loved Punjabi dhol.
Editing by Rameshwar S. Bhagat keeps the pacing brisk enough that you don't have time to dwell on how the hero managed to cross international borders using a passport that was burned in scene four, cutting away from logistical impossibilities with the practiced ease of an editor who knows the audience is just here for the next explosion.

Beneath the gunfire and the passport fraud, the film attempts to sketch out a romance that transcends national borders, pitching the Raw agent and the ISI operative as star-crossed lovers who just want to retire to a nice apartment in Havana.
This is standard stuff for Hindi films dealing with the eternal cold war between India and Pakistan, usually handled with the kind of cautious neutrality that offends nobody and inspires nothing.
Yet there's an odd melancholy in how little either government seems to value these people once they stop being useful, treating human assets like rented lawnmowers that can be returned to the shed when the grass gets too tall.
Tiger isn't fighting for flag or country by the time the third act rolls around; he's fighting for a quiet life with a woman who has a better collection of trench coats than he does, which makes him the most relatable secret agent ever put on celluloid.
When you compare it to something like Shah Rukh Khan's Don, which relied entirely on smug winks and tailored suits, this film feels remarkably sweaty and earnest, a throwback to an era when heroes could get a grease stain on their jacket and still save the day before intermission.

The climax on a bridge involving a hijacked train feels entirely tacked on to justify another ten minutes of pyrotechnics, resolving the geopolitical tension with a handshake and a brisk jog toward the horizon.
Nobody learns anything, the governments agree to pretend nothing happened, and the lovers disappear into the crowd like a couple leaving a mediocre wedding early.
It's not a masterpiece, not by a long shot, but it moves fast enough to prevent you from picking at the loose threads until you're already out in the parking lot trying to remember where you left your keys.