Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Race 3
Non-stop
Nonsense
Abbas-Mustan
had created the Race franchise, with
mindless and twisty plots, but their films managed to entertain to some extent.
They had glamour, style and a few thrills.
Now the
directorial baton has been handed over to Remo D’Souza, and it is clear a few
minutes into Race 3, that he dropped
it. He has been given Salman Khan and a seemingly unlimited budget, which he
has splurged on foreign locations, action sequences that overstay their welcome
by several minutes and a script so stoned out of its mind that the film’s
characters have to sit down at the end and figure out how it went. And even
then, so many strands are left untangled.
Anil Kapoor
plays Shamsher Singh, a superrich arms dealer who lives on Al Shifah Island
(presumably somewhere in the Middle East), but he comes from a village in Uttar
Pradesh, and dreams of returning there in glory some day. Meanwhile he lapses
into Bhojpuri whenever he can, mainly with sidekick Raghu (Sharat Saxena) and
nephew Sikander (Salman Khan). He has grown-up twins of his own—Sanjana (Daisy
Shah) and Suraj (Saqib Saleem), who call each other “bro”, and start fights with
rival gangs that are invariably ended by Sikander. Yash (Bobby Deol) and femme
fatale Jessica (Jacqueline Fernandez) complete the menagerie. There is also a
two-scene villain (Freddy Daruwala), but with a family so evil, who needs
baddies?
As it always
happens in such movies, everybody is double-crossing everybody, nobody is who
they seem to be. In the midst of grimacing at each other, the “bros” have to
steal from a bank vault in Cambodia (why? just!) a hard disc containing visuals
that can be used to blackmail Indian politicians. The price for the disc, only
two billion dollars, half in bearer bonds (seriously!), for which the Singhs
have to take a bank loan. When the poor banker quite correctly asks what for,
he is given that “our business is our business, none of your business” line.
Luckily, in Al Shifah, Aadhar is not mandatory!
Nothing
makes sense, the dots do not quite connect, and as the film stretches on, with
slow songs (that sound better on radio than they look on screen) to add to the
boredom, even Jessica wants to know “Itne
jhatke, when is this going to end?
Salman Khan
seems to have a defence mechanism to cope with such dumb films, he goes into
auto-pilot mode, with a bored expression, and then at some point takes off his
shirt—so does Bobby Deol. Anil Kapoor is the only one who tries acting, the
others strut around in awful costumes and try to look like they mean
business... only they don’t know what business. And then, they actually have
the nerve to threaten a Race 4!
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