Saturday, January 26, 2013
Race 2
Turns Turkey
If someone were to spoof ‘Director Duo’ Abbas Mustan’s style of
filmmaking, they’d probably come up with something like Race 2.
A car is blown up early in the film.
The characters are introduced one by one, and they stride in slow motion
showing lots of skin. (Deepika Padukone should be mildly offended at being described
as a ”pillar who can be a killer.”) The location is Turkey, where,
what-do-you-know, Indians run everything and cops are just never visible even
when there are mad chases and explosions happening all over Istanbul.
John Abraham plays the greedy and ruthless Armaan Malik, Deepika
Padukone is his half sister (and "full shaani" the dialogue writer helpfully adds) Alina and Jacqueline Fernandez his girlfriend
Omisha. Saif Ali Khan’s Ranvir Singh
returns from Race (2008) along with
fruit chomping Robert D’Costa (Anil Kapoor). In Race 2 his sidekick is Cherry (Ameesha Patel), and the vulgar
dialogue these two are made to speak has to be heard to be believed.
The plot is the usual Abbas Mustan maze of scheming, double crossing,
bombastic dialogue maaroing and some
steamy stuff, though much less than in Race.
Even though the locations are new, the look is gaudy, tackiness drips from
the production design trying hard to be stylish, and the way Armaan and Ranvir
use million and billion Euros in throwaway lines, it’s hilarious—like kids
playing with Monopoly money and pretending they own the world. Ranvir even pulls off a heist of the most
unlikely object – a religious relic—in a sequence so outrageous as to be
comic. In fact the whole film is
unintentionally funny, when Abbas Mustan clearly intended it to be thrilling.
The leading men and women have been cast for their bodies rather than
their talent, though Saif Ali Khan looks rather beefy. John Abraham gets one
unnecessary boxing scene, so that he can flex his muscles. The music is dull
and the picturisation even more so. The Allah Duhai song pops up in the middle just
like that, with its old music video style imagery—the kind most films use for
end credits and promos.
The Director Duo started sliding downhill with last year’s Players-- time to change the formula
before their films start looking like parodies.
Labels: Cinemaah
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