Sultan
- Director
- Ali Abbas Zafar
- Studio
- Yash Raj Films
- Release Date
- 6 July 2016
- Running Time
- 170 min
- Language
- Hindi
- Country
- India
- Budget
- ₹90.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹623.33 Cr
Cast
Review
Ali, you've made a film that works despite itself—a bloated, melodramatic mess that somehow still lands emotional punches when it counts. "Sultan" is driven almost entirely by Salman Khan's raw, unglamorous performance; watching him shuffle through Haryana in a worn vest, wrestling with his own mediocrity, is genuinely compelling cinema. You strip away the typical Khan heroics and give us a man grappling with irrelevance and regret, and that vulnerability carries the first half. But then the film trips over its own ambition—the MMA angle feels tacked on, the physics-defying climactic bout is laughable, and Anushka Sharma, despite her spirited effort, gets criminally sidelined in her own love story, reduced to a prop in Sultan's redemption arc. The direction is uneven; you nail the intimate moments between Sultan and Aarfa but lose the plot entirely when trying to balance sports drama with domestic melodrama, which is frankly too much film stuffed into one narrative.
What saves this from complete disaster is the emotional core—Khan's weathered performance and your willingness to let a Bollywood hero fail catastrophically, at least for a stretch. The training montages have real grit, the wrestling sequences feel earned rather than choreographed, and there's an honesty to Sultan's broken pride that typical Khan films wouldn't dare touch. But you can't just lean on performance and sentiment to excuse narrative sloppiness and bloated runtime. This is a 2.5-hour film trying to be
Storyline
So there's this guy Sultan who used to be this incredible wrestler back in the day, but now he's just hanging out in this small town in Haryana living a pretty quiet life. Then this businessman named Aakash shows up trying to convince him to compete in some fancy new mixed martial arts league to boost its popularity. Sultan's not really interested at first, but Aakash manages to get the full story out of Sultan's best friend about how this whole wrestling journey actually started.
Turns out Sultan got super motivated to become a champion because of this girl named Aarfa who was also a wrestler. She was pretty harsh with him initially and basically told him she'd never be with him unless he actually trained hard and became someone impressive. So Sultan threw himself into training like crazy, entered competitions, and managed to win her over. They ended up getting married and became this power couple in wrestling, traveling around the world competing for India at major events.
Things get complicated when they both qualify for the Olympics, but Aarfa finds out she's pregnant. She makes the tough choice to step back from her dream so Sultan can go for the gold medal, which he actually manages to win. But here's where it gets messy—his success goes to his head and he starts acting kind of arrogant and jerky. He's so focused on his career that he basically abandons Aarfa when she's about to have their baby, and when he finally comes back home, he discovers something really tragic happened.
