Film: Once Upon A Time In Mumbai Dobaara
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Imran Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Sonali Bendre
Director: Milan Luthria
Producer: Ekta Kapoor, Shobha Kapoor
Banner: Balaji Motion Pictures
Music: Pritam Chakraborty,Anupam Am
Such utter crap, and done with
heartbreaking seriousness. It takes some doing to wrap up such a
time-worn love triangle into a pretence of modern storytelling.
Milan Luthria has never been a great
filmmaker. At least his earlier films like "Kachche Dhaage" and "Dirty
Picture" had some interesting conflicts between characters who are
driven by a desire for revenge but are frustrated in their malevolence
by their love for the very same people they want to hate.
The problem with "...Dobaara" is that
the two main characters who love each other to death are people we have
met over and over again. Most notably in Ram Gopal Varma's "Company"
where Ajay Devgn and Viveik Oberoi played gangster and protege with
great conviction and ballsy velocity.
The subsequent spinoffs have gotten seriously diluted.
This one is a sequel to Luthria's
not-so-engaging film where Ajay Devgn's imposing personality had made
the pale and sometime unintentionally funny proceedings bearable.
Except for Sonakshi Sinha playing a
starlet who talks too hard and too much and gets the male protagonists
(who need to be spanked for playing with guns when their IQ level
suggests video games would be more apt) into a serious conflict merely
because she's too dumb to see they both love her,"...Dobaara" has no
redeeming qualities.
Akshay Kumar as a Dawood
doppelgang(st)er is a laugh. His dialogues meant to show his mastery
over the hoary art of rhetorics, come out sounding like wimpy words of
wacked-out wisdom picked up from messages in Chinese cookies, if not
from forwarded sms messages.
I don't know who wrote the hideously
bloated dialogues of this film. And I don't want to know. I'd just like
to suggest to the dialogue writer to go easy on the bumper-sticker
wisdom next time. You can't make the hero look heroic by spilling tacky
wisdom all over the frames in the hope that audiences would applaud the
bombastic words without thinking about their relevance.
This film wallows in a kind of imbecilic
irreverence where the protagonists seem bold brave, sexy and even
brazen but are actually cardboard versions of the triangular lovers in
Raj Kapoor's "Sangam" and Vinod Kumar's "Mere Huzoor". But at least love
triangles of the past were honest about their melodramatic intentions.
"...Dobaara" cloaks its outdated radical ideas in a rumbustious display
of trendiness.
One of the 'jokes' that ties Sonakshi's
character to her lover-boy Imran Khan is his misuse of the word
'intercourse'. The film uses the word over and over again like a school
boy that has just found a non-punishable way to say 'sex' in the
classroom.
A flavour of flagrant criminality is
created through back-projected nostalgia, like an archival cricket match
'fixed' by the all-powerful underworld don. Fleets of black and yellow
Fiat cars ply up and down Mumbai's streets in a show of periodicity. A
wanton woman (Sophie Chowdhary, in a seductive cameo) cheats on her
unsuspecting husband, making out with the dreaded don in backroom at
noisy party.
You can almost smell the cheap perfume
and the discount-rated champagne trying to pass as the genuine stuff in
Shoaib's party. This guy thinks he is menacing. He is actually a joke.
And if the real Dawood is anything like the way he is portrayed here we
have nothing to fear except his cheesy dialogue-baazi.
Where in all this self-defeating noise
and activity is the of slippery sinisterness on the streets of Mumbai?
The gangster-villain (Akshay insists he is a villain, and who are we to
argue with a guy who keeps smashing up furniture and appliances every
time he doesn't get his way?) and his cronies appear to have walked out
of 'loin' Ajit den in the 1970s, not quite sure which way they are
supposed to head in the present day milieu of such awe-inspiring
gangster epics as Luc Besson's "Taken" and Amit Kumar's "Monsoon
Shootout".
This one comes too late, and except for a
skillfully-shot train robbery sequence featuring Imran Khan at the
start, it has too little to offer in the way action and adventure.
The stunts appear stunted. Except for
Sonakshi who plays the self-seeking starlet with earnest airheadedness,
Pritobash Tripathy who plays Imran's sidekick with misplaced sincerity
and Sonali Bhendre who delivers the only truthfully-worded monologue in
this verbally-cramped drama, the other performances are all of the
watch-me-ham variety.
And really, what this film has done to
the Mohd Rafi Qawwalli "Tayyab ali pyar ka dushman" would make Manmohan
Desai wince if he was alive.