“Raees” follows the 70s gangster film formula to the T, complete with the honest police officer who will stop at nothing to capture his nemesis, the perfunctory romance, and the final redemption that makes the audience root for the flawed hero.

Raees will turn out to be a comfortable winner at the ticket windows. Despite a routine story, it has a lot of masala for the audience to keep them satisfied. Business in the first five-day weekend will be phenomenal. Single-screen cinemas will see surging crowds of the kind not seen too often these days.

Watch Raees for Nawaz and SRK. Their solo scenes are great but their interactions are delectable. Nawaz brings pleasant proportions of comic relief. The dialogs of Raees are going to stay with people for a long time. If you are a Bollywood masala fan, do not miss this.

Khan isn’t as bold here as he was in Fan, but this isn’t a greatest-hits package either, like his turn in Dear Zindagi. Perhaps realising that audiences would expect him to do Tony Montana, he gives them his version of Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel: ingenious, unflappable. Yet, because Khan holds so much in reserve, Raees remains a cipher. To borrow an old theatrical aphorism, he plays the king as if afraid someone else might play the ace.

If you are in the mood to watch an intense Shahrukh Khan doing some hard-core ‘dishoom-dishoom’ and mouthing dialogues like ‘Din Aur Raat Logon Ke Hotein Hai, Sheron Ka Zamaana Hota Hai’, then Raees might be your pick for this week. But don’t blame us if you end up loving Nawaz a little more than King Khan! JUST LIKE US!  

The movie’s philosophy is best summed up not in the line “Baniye ka dimaag aur miyan bhai ki daring”, but in the observation that where there are restrictions, there will be rebellion. Raees’s resistance is conventional, but the movie’s slyness and lack of moralising are off the books, like the liquor.