Dec 29 2011
Don 2
With the original Don not having a sequel, director Farhan Akhtar, who directed the remake of the original, goes with an original story for the sequel Don 2, which continues the saga of Don(Shah Rukh Khan). The film is another example of the phrase Style over Substance, propping up its non-existent story with slick cinematography, exotic locales and nice action.
After breaking Vardhan(Boman Irani) out of jail, the titular hero goes after Euro printing plates that are located in a bank vault in Zurich. While he puts together a team with Aisha(Lara Dutta) and computer hacker Sameer(Kunal Kapoor), policewoman Roma(Priyanka Chopra) is still after him.
Don had an entertaining story that included mistaken identities, a vengeful heroine, double crosses, interesting team members and a key item that everyone wanted to lay their hands on. But Don 2 consists of a jailbreak and a heist. That’s it. A number of characters from the original are back and the new ones are stock characters in any heist film. The globe-trotting and competent action try to hold our interest but without a strong story or interesting characters, they fall flat too.
The jailbreak has some interesting moments though things happen too smoothly. The heist puts together all the stock elements like an impenetrable security system, a computer genius who hacks into the system with utmost ease and team members with specific assignments. There are a few twists along the way and the usual fun in seeing how the pieces of the plan fall into place. But it goes on for so long and seems so familiar that there is no tension or suspense during any portion of it.
Don 2 is headlined by a criminal but one wouldn’t know it seeing the film. Unlike Ajith in Mankatha, SRK doesn’t play a really bad guy. He is like any leader in a heist film and his only bad quality seems to be greed as he saves the heroine, assists the police, helps out a good guy and targets and/or kills only those who aren’t particularly good themselves. SRK further dilutes the character, playing him like a model.
We can only hope that Billa 2, which is a prequel rather than a sequel (necessitated by the different ways in which Don and Billa ended), is a better 2nd movie about the famous criminal.
4 responses so far
Good review Balaji, I was very disappointed with Don 2. The movie did not make any sense and Priyanka’s character was the most confused one. Her character mysteriously seems to have lost the inclination to take revenge on the Don. The film turned into a hiest movie with the cops just playing sidekicks. Shahrukh was getting himself arrested and released as if he was visiting some friends place. Overall a boring movie.
“Spectacularly boring”. Non of the slick work done through cinematography, location and action appeal to me. One of my biggest criticism of Hindi cinema is that they put so much effort into catering for foreign (NRI’s) audience. This spoils the identity of home cinema, esp. remakes like DON. I loved the first one but I can’t understand why make a sequel (Hollywood???) and the end product feels like,.. well Oceans eleven!
and on a different note,. what do you think of songs from ‘three’ and ‘Nanban’?
Good call, on the review. Just wanted to add that the music did not help either. The first one had some decent songs and reasonably good bgm. I will admit that I probably enjoyed may be 10 mins (that is stretching it a bit) of SRK and his “styles” and only because I like SRK. But the rest of movie made little sense while watching and no sense at all afterwards.
I saw this in 3D a week ago with friends. We went to see Sherlock Holmes but one of the friends came so late we missed it, and were kinda forced to go see this instead. Thankfully there was subtitles. 3D was not all that bad, of course its not comparable to Avatar, but I was impressed what they were able to do, considering the budget.