{"id":183221,"date":"2013-08-18T16:43:19","date_gmt":"2013-08-18T11:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=183221"},"modified":"2013-08-18T16:43:19","modified_gmt":"2013-08-18T11:13:19","slug":"once-upon-a-time-in-mumbaai-dobaara-plays-out-the-oldest-bollywood-gangster-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/once-upon-a-time-in-mumbaai-dobaara-plays-out-the-oldest-bollywood-gangster-story\/","title":{"rendered":"'Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara plays out the oldest Bollywood gangster story'"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Once-Upon-a-Time-In-Mumbaai-Dobara\"<\/a>When we left the Mumbai underworld at the end of Milan Luthria\u2019s Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai<\/i>, Shoaib Khan had the world at his feet. In Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara!<\/i>, the atrociously named sequel, Shoaib has suffered the singular misfortune of metamorphosising from perennially-scowling Emraan Hashmi to occasionally-menacing-but-mostly-gawking Akshay Kumar, even if he has risen to international gangsterhood. What good is an underworld empire if the best you can do to intimidate somebody is awkwardly deliver a line of dialogue that could only have been written by a little copywriter who was banished to his little office and asked to come up with 100 punchlines before dinner?
\nThere is, true, a magnetism to Shoaib that Hashmi wouldn\u2019t have managed, but the film\u2019s obsession with being larger than life hurts its purpose of telling a simple story, which ends up looking thin. The impact of the dialogue, even Shoaib\u2019s unapologetic embrace of his dark side \u2014 \u201cHero marne ke baad swarg jaata hai\u2026 aur villain jeete ji swarg paata hai<\/i>\u201d \u2014 is lost by repetition, and the inane catchphrases do for character development what inane catchphrases always do, reducing the protagonists to the familiar trite archetypes that the first movie at least ostensibly tried to steer clear of: Shoaib is the power-that-is, with the attendent hubris, while Aslam (Khan) is the young up-and-comer with a heart of gold.
\nWhich would have been fine, if the film was even attempting to comment on the changing nature of the underworld under Dawood Ibrahim. An old way of life ended when control over Mumbai was centralised, but Luthria isn\u2019t concerned with anything but setting his two alpha males up for the final confrontation. There is none of the philosophising of the first film, none of the subtlety either: Luthria sets up the climax through the wonderfully original device of throwing a woman in to raise the stakes, complete with the wonderfully original casting of Sonakshi Sinha (who, to her credit, delivers a fairly solid, if stolid, performance). Sinha\u2019s Jasmine Mirza, whose arrival on the scene is marked with so much foreboding that Luthria might as well have used large, blinking signs saying \u201cPLOT DEVICE!\u201d, charms both Shoaib and Aslam in what Rajiv Masand rightly calls \u201cthe laziest love triangle you could possibly imagine\u201d. It so easily slips into the groove that the saheb-biwi-gangster love triangle follows, that for the most part you\u2019re wishing it is all a hoax, that Jasmine isn\u2019t just a na\u00efve girl who thinks the notorious gangster who rigged the pointless \u2018Sankalp Best New Face\u2019 award for her looks at her with a platonic, avuncular eye. It isn\u2019t suspension of disbelief if even the actors are doing it.
\nKnowingly or not, Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara<\/i>\u2019s protagonists play out the oldest Bollywood gangster story there is. To some extent, it is even compelling, mostly because the difference in personal styles, however artificial, suggests something better than the obvious conclusion it meanders towards. This difference is accentuated by the lead actors\u2019 inability to turn in anything resembling a convincing performance. While Kumar\u2019s general bumbling nature combined with the dialogue he\u2019s made to deliver makes him sound like something out of a Kanti Shah film, Khan\u2019s gangster act resembles nothing more than a fish out of water. Thankfully, he is a better lover than fighter, and is fairly passable by the end.
\nUnlike the juvenile and scatterbrained Chennai Express<\/i>, this week\u2019s monument to mediocrity is, thankfully, a more mature film. But like last week\u2019s atrocity, OUATIMD! <\/i>is too obsessed with how it looks and sounds to have any sort of substance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The film is too obsessed with how it looks and sounds to have any sort of substance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":183222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,8377,8378],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}