AN ILL-TIMED GANGSTER DRAMA

STARRING : Akshay Kumar, lmran Khan, Sonakshi Sinha; Director: Milan Luthria

D IRECTOR: Milan Luthria •,,,,_ 1,,,_-.,, ;....). ~ ow do I put this politely? This is arguably one of the most awful, ill-timed gangster dramas with most performances so loud and unassimilated that these characters could easily be contestants in an Eid special segment of Comedy Circus where the theme is 'Gangsta Rap'.

Such utter crap, and done with heartbreaking seriousness.

Milan Luthria has never been a great filmmaker. At least his earlier films like Kachche Dhaage and Dirty Picture had some interesting conflicts between characters who are driven by a desire for revenge but are frustrated in their malevolence by their love for the very same people they want to hate.

The problem with .Dobaara is that the two main characters who love each other to death are people we have met over and over again. Most notably in Ram Gopal Varma's Company where Ajay Devgn and Viveik Oberoi played gangster and protege with great conviction and ballsy velocity.

The subsequent spinoffs have gotten seriously diluted.

This one is a sequel to Luthria's notso-engaging film where Ajay Devgn's imposing personality had made the pale and unintentionally funny proceedings bearable.

Except for Sonakshi Sinha playing a starlet who talks too hard and too much and gets the male protagonists (who need to be spanked for playing with guns when their IQ level suggests video games would be more apt) into a serious conflict merely because she's too dumb to see they both love her, .Dobaara has no redeeming qualities.

Akshay Kumar as a Dawood doppelgang(st)er is a laugh. His dialogues, meant to show his mastery over the hoary art of rhetorics, come out sounding like wimpy words of wackedout wisdom picked up from messages in Chinese cookies.

This film wallows in a kind of imbecilic irreverence where the protagonists seem bold, sexy and even brazen but are actually cardboard versions of the triangular lovers in Raj Kapoor's Sangam and Vinod Kumar's Mere Huzoor. But at least love t riangles of the past were honest about their melodramatic intentions.

You can almost smell the cheap perfume and the discount-rated champagne trying to pass as the genuine stuff in Shoaib's party. This guy thinks he is menacing. He is actually a joke. And if the real Dawood is anything like the way he is portrayed here we have nothing to fear except his cheesy dialogue-baazi.

The gangster-villain (Akshay insists he is a villain, and who are we to argue with a guy who keeps smashing up furniture and appliances every time he doesn't get his way?) and his cronies