NOT QUITE WRITE
The stars rock. The stunts rock. The dances rock. The writing sucks.
NOV 26, 2006 – THE CENSOR’S CERTIFICATE FOR DHOOM 2 has the number of reels as 16, which approximates to roughly two-and-a-half hours. But I’ll let you in on a little secret – the content, such as it is, barely fills up a couple of hours. So what’s with the extra thirty minutes, you ask? For the slow-motion shots, of course. With Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai, Hrithik Roshan and Abhishek Bachchan, this is a star-studded film – what stars! what studs! – and their contracts clearly include a clause that says they will not begin emoting till they have locked eyes with the camera and had their moment (or moments, and more moments) of introductory slo-mo glory. So we’re treated to shots such as the one with Bipasha Basu – as a policewoman so bodylicious, the rest of the force is surely imagining a game of cops ‘n’ rubbers – at a shooting range, with a gun in hand, with her eyes glinting with steely concentration at the outlined target, and… with her hair billowing silkily in the wind. (That’s probably why she’s not sweating, because of that invisible fan under her chin.) And Hrithik, I don’t think I ever saw him walk normally – in normal time, that is. He gets into that slo-mo stride and keeps walking – and walking and walking – towards us. Heck, even Uday Chopra is allotted a quota of slow-motion.
And that’s why Dhoom 2 is as much an action adventure as a show reel for the gorgeousness of its stars. I got my biggest laugh in the scene where Hrithik whips up a salad dinner for himself and Aishwarya. (They’re both crooks. On their tail are cops Abhishek, Uday and Bipasha. End of functional story.) She takes a dainty bite, then asks if she could have some, you know, real food – so he fixes her a big, juicy, calorific burger. What a laugh, Aishwarya Rai wolfing down a burger! You should see her here, the sexiest she’s been in a while. (Performance-wise, she’s annoyingly affected, but hey, she was sincere in Umrao Jaan and that tanked like nobody’s business, so why complain if she’s back in plastic mode in search of a hit?) Aishwarya and Bipasha and Hrithik have quite a few dance numbers – each one wonderfully choreographed – and despite all the gravity-defying jumping around, there’s nothing on their bodies that jiggles, nothing that wobbles. Only the fact that their mouths are lip-synching the songs reminds us that they’re really actors, not androids. Oh no, burgers are definitely not what these people were having for dinner – especially while shooting a film where Hrithik is described as, “Duniya mein sabse kaabil aur cool chor,” the most capable, cool thief in the world. Dhoom 2 is the kind of star vehicle where coolness becomes the USP of a chor.
Apart from the stars – a flashy Hrithik steals the film from under Abhishek’s dour nose – the reason Dhoom 2 works to the extent that it does is because it keeps invoking masala Bollywood (Abhishek’s unexpected nod to his father’s coin-tossing in Sholay, Hrithik’s elaborately silly heists reminiscent of Dharmendra’s in Jugnu and Shalimar) and masala Hollywood, especially the Bond adventures. Like the latter, this too begins “somewhere in the desert of Namibia” and winds up “somewhere in the Fiji islands”, making a stop at colourful Rio along the way. I thought I saw the name of Vic Armstrong in the credits, and if this is the Vic Armstrong – the man behind some of the best 007 stunts – that probably explains the Live and Let Die-style water-scooter leap. Some of the action is so preposterously entertaining, I didn’t know if I was laughing with the movie or at it. But between stunts, we’re at the mercy of the writers – and I didn’t even mind the laziness in logic or continuity or character development so much as the out-of-nowhere reach for grand emotion, with a completely unneeded love story that reaches its own levels of preposterousness by the time someone witnesses an act of betrayal while dressed in a Pagliacci clown-suit. I think we’re meant to sniffle at the operatic sadness of it all, but you may end up thinking: Why all this fuss in a film that hired Bipasha Basu for the sole reason that she could put on a Baywatch-red swimsuit and jog… in slow motion?
Copyright ©2006 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Sagarika
April 10, 2008
brangan: For your older posts it’d be interesting to also read what folks had to say back then. Would you grab the comments over too unless you’d rather let them go in making room for fresher viewpoints? Just this once, I took the liberty to bring the older comments over. Because after reading the them, I’m almost afraid (of brickbats) to admit that I’ve seen D2 three times since last summer for its sheer timepassness. The songs/dances really grew on me (except that preposterous “Excuse me” slo-mo number in Rio). I still trip on “Dil Laga Na”…the lyrics aren’t at all bad, I mean I wasn’t really looking for “Gulzarian metaphors,” so. I knew I’d have to check out my brains before I popped the DVD in. That I did so with such willingness, three times around, continues to confound me. 🙂
anonymous | Posted on December 1, 2006:
Dhoom 2 Sucks…..bigtime. I mean come on…..does anyone not notice that there is no story. dances, bikinis and “trying to be funny” acts. Aishwarya simply cannot act. Neither does she have a body. Bipasha can be compared to Tera Patrick! Its time Bollywood re-defines the meaning of STUNT scene. Jumping all over the place doesn’t make it an action flick.
moonbeam | Posted on December 2, 2006:
as always! the movie was sucky and boring, mainly cuz it was so wannabe bond, but with a metrosexual villain.. i mean hrithik has to be a gay icon , after all the shots of his perfect 6 abs bronzed topless body .. aish was terrible and came across as majorly desperate essaying a role that was meant for a early 20’s kid, not an established bollywood star, i can never picture aishwarya as a skanky ho- like this movie tried to make her out to be.. abhishek was strictly average…bips was terrible..only entertaining character was uday chopra.. which says a lot for this movie! the story was a joke, the heists were laughably bad, direction was slick but couldnt make up for the rest of the crap but action sells howsoever bad it is.. no wonder indians are lapping this crap up.
brangan | Posted on December 3, 2006:
Thanks anonymous. Moonbeam – I still haven’t gotten over laughing at your description of Ash as a “skanky ho” Thinking back, that really *is* what she came out looking like 🙂
Chhavi | Posted on December 13, 2006:
skanks aside, I saw this on sunday with 8 other people I blackmailed, cajoled or otherwise dragged to the theatre. One of them was stoned and had the absolute best time. One of the others practically needed a bucket for the Hrithik-induced drool. We were all a little worried about abhishek’s random affair that went nowhere just like ms. bullseye (but our consensus is that she’ll return in D:3?) (now if they’d only drop Uday. UGH!) It was nothing less than you’d promised. You didn’t mention that besides the excuse of a plot and horrid dialogue, the songs’ lyrics are the worst we’ve heard in a while. But ahhh, the eye candy 😉
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Anu Warrier
April 10, 2008
A reviewof Dhoom 2? Why now?
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Suchi
April 10, 2008
I must be one of the few people who find Hrithik unbearably bad-looking!
I haven’t really followed new Tamil movies in a while. Is there an equivalent in Tamil cinema of Dhoom et al–“a show reel for the gorgeousness of its stars”?
I do find that Tamil cinema has less of a tendency to airbrush and bathe in golden light its stars and set. The lighting is often more real; you can see skin texture, etc. At the other extreme, I often wonder if Senthil and Goundamani are plastered with oil and given bad hair–as if to say, these are real characters, we don’t make their faces up.
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Sagarika
June 25, 2008
brangan: “..that preposterous “Excuse me” slo-mo number” – Funny how quickly that notion collapsed. I’ve been listening to D2 (and D1) for several days now and FINALLY realized what had actually bothered me about that particular number was Uday Chopra. Now that I have enough of a distance from my last viewing of D2, I was able to supplant the original picturization of the song with my own, and realized that I really LOVE this song.
Thanks to the state-of-the-art butchery that was the Vaseegara picturization, there’s a thesis waiting to be written on why it’s important to sit thru songs that one loves (if one is lucky enough — like I was with TZP and Unnale Unnale, both movies someone will have to twist my arm to make me sit thru, only because their songs have already taken me down an imaginary path of incredible beauty from which I refuse to be teleported to a (potentially) nighmarish universe of someone else’s making — to have listened to them before watching the movie) with eyes tightly shut (when in the movie hall) or with finger poised on the skip button.
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Sagarika
June 25, 2008
p.s: Oh, and forgot to mention this *important* bit that made that “Excuse me” number eventually lovable — whenever I hear its opening line, “My name is Ali,” I think of either Imtiaz Ali or Rashid Ali or Saif Ali. Anyone, anything, but Uday. 🙂
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