The biggest money makers last year had one thing in common, apart from the action; lots and lots of beards. Yes, we see the common thread of defeating unchecked villains in a torrent of bullets and blasts and fists, but we must say, beards really pushed all the films to the finish line, by the looks of it.

Ranbir Kapoor in Animal

Animal is your typico inter-family, inter-generational war film with some millennial issues like parental neglect thrown in for relevance, but the one thing everyone must have heard about it was that it was mercilessly violent. That said, that is not the pull here. We think that Ranbir Kapoor in that intense beard, totally giving a young Sanjay Dutt (in a very ‘90s Sanjay Dutt movie) is the pull. It really distracts us from the fug of pointless news that has surrounded him since his debut in 2007.

Bobby Deol in Animal

Everyone in Animal had copious amounts of hair on their heads and faces and it was all a bit much. This isn’t a gang we want to be having any of our meals with because odds on eight out of 10 beards catching food and various debris in them. Also while everyone in Animal is running around doppelgangering everyone and setting up decoys, and attacking each other, where do they find the time to tend to their hair? Both head and face. Anyone with that kind of hair knows it takes one night of sleeping on it to tangle it, so either these very manly, violent men are sleeping in silk bonnets on silk pillowcases, or they’re lying about plotting, planning, attacking, and killing, and just getting their assistants to do it while they tend to hairier matters.

Shah Rukh Khan in Pathan

Every now and then, the last superstar of Bollywood likes us to remember that he can and will build an 8-pack, and then we have to look at it when it turns up unannounced on our screens. Pathan had SRK in dreads or a man bun and unkempt beard, so, we suppose, he could pass as a chill dude instead of a spy out to single handedly annihilate the dushman. But it wasn’t our fav SRK look ever if we’re honest, because why the braids? Why the strands of hair artfully arranged around your face? Why the farce of the beard, if you’re just being chill and singing songs on a beach while also masterminding an operation to rid the motherland of terrorists?

Shah Rukh Khan in Jawan

This is no SRK in the army film, it’s all about the lead avenging the personal demons created by life events by defeating the faceless evil in society. Who knows? This is a chance for SRK to flex his action muscle while he shows up with a ‘new look’ aka shaved head and beard. Which we would take any day over his Pathan look.