RICh, RE sTLE ss AND COMpLETELY CLUELE ss

R Ace 2

STARRING: Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, John Abraham, Jacqueline Fernandez, Anil Kapoor, Ameesha Patel

DIRECTED BY: Abbas-Mustan

HH

Everyone is busy deceiving everyone else in this paper caper, which probably looked tempting in the writing but comes across on screen as a masquerade of hedonistic hi-jinx filmed at exotic locales where men and women play for high stakes, live dangerously and die foolishly.

Abbas-Mustan’s love for depicting the high life is by now well-known. Everyone in an Abbas-Mustan caper takes his or her life at the race course seriously when in fact the characters are all an extended joke. They are comicbook cut-outs pasted on to the big wide screen with all their exaggerations blown out of proportion. It’s hard to pinpoint where the leakage in this latest Abbas-Mustan adventurecaper begins to seep septically into the plot. But you know there is something serious amiss in the plot when one protagonist, Saif Ali Khan deadpans: “Revenge is best served cold.”

Really? If that were indeed the case then the volumes of vendetta served up by disgruntled men and women in Race 2 should have made our adrenaline...er... race really hard.

Alas, the proceedings are as exciting as graffiti on a newly-painted toilet wall. The uni-expression macho man John Abraham loves the leggy Deepika Padukone who loves the scowling Saif Ali Khan who loves Jacqueline Fernandes. In the end, these self-serving hedonists seem to love none but themselves.

Boring in their self-absorption and utterly oblivious to the world around them where pain and suffering are to be obtained once the fun and games end, these characters are busy striking artificial poses in carefully-toned bodies draped in the best dresses and suits created for the rich and the restless.

These are the nowhere people searching for thrills in a plot that revels in restlessness and seeks succour in making suckers out of all the characters. The only mildly interesting characters are the brassy detective played by Anil Kapoor and his air-head secretary Ameesha Patel: she flutters her eyelashes at his incessant phallic jokes feigning complete ignorance.

Sadly, the holiday mood that prevails through the film grips the film’s architects. They seem to be on leave as the action director takes over the proceedings. To be fair a couple of chase sequences specially one through the crowded streets of Istanbul where Saif hunts down his beloved’s killer, are killers. But the climax on board a fake luxury aircraft is a howl. Amateur adventurers getting a kick out of their big-boy antics, John and Saif are to be taken as seriously as Superman and