(Our software does not permit us to show less than a 0.1 in the rating graphic above. Please note that the actual rating given to this film by our critic is 0 stars.)

Language: Hindi 

Take a dozen Salman Khan starrers. Peel and dice them without washing. Throw the whole lot into a wok with stale oil left over from last week’s cooking. Toss them together and serve when half cooked. 

That seems to be the recipe director Prabhu Deva followed for his latest collaboration with Salman Khan. Radhe: Your Most Wanted Bhai harks back to their blockbuster team-up in 2009, Wanted, in which Khan played an undercover cop going by the name from which this new film takes its title. Wanted was a remake of the Telugu smash hit Pokiri. Text on screen right before Radhe rolls declares that it is based on the Korean film The Outlaws directed by Kang Yun-sung – the fact that they do not bother to specify whether the Korea in this case is South or North Korea should tell you all you need to know about Radhe’s attention to detail. 

Briefly, Radhe is the story of a turf war in Mumbai’s drug-peddling scene when a new lord – a guy called Rana played by Randeep Hooda – enters the picture, and a disgraced cop (Radhe, but of course) is called in to bust this deadly racket that has led to an outbreak of addiction and deaths among the city’s youth. 

(Also read on Firstpost —The Salman Khan interview | 'Radhe's box office may be almost zero, but we're going ahead with the release')

It speaks volumes about Bollywood’s terrifying notion of coolth that it persists in reminding us of that other Salman-starrer Tere Naam in which his character was called Radhe years before Wanted was released. Tere Naam was a horrific romanticisation of a self-destructive man whose obsessive, proprietorial attitude towards the heroine was portrayed as a mark of his bottomless well of love. Radhe is not scary in the way Tere Naam was. It is just plain bad.