The deserts of Namibia: the Queen of Britain and her two young grandsons are travelling across them by train, complete with the crown jewels in a guarded carriage. The three royals are playing a game and end up chasing each other around the carriage, but the guards outside the crown's compartment do a double take when the Queen walks down the corridor twice in the same direction - there is an impostor on board. An impostor in disguise who has stolen the crown and is now on top of the carriage with a snowboard, ready to escape if the security don't get him first...
Dhoom 2 was the sequel to the hit Bollywood action thriller Dhoom, but ended up being little loved in comparison in spite of expectations that it would go through the roof in terms of popularity. After all, it had some of modern India's biggest stars in it, including Aishwarya Rai joining the cast of the previous film as a thief who may be more than she seems... well, all right, she is definitely more than she seems. In truth, the film doesn't start off too badly with some bright comedy and well-choreographed action scenes, but dare I say it, once Aishwarya arrives an hour in, something goes wrong.
The plotline has the set up that two cops, Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan) and comic relief Ali (Uday Chopra) are hot on the trail of an international thief known only as "A", the man we saw pull off the robbery in the pre-credits sequence and played by Hrithik Roshan. That sequence is just ridiculous enough to be engaging, yet everything after it grows increasingly serious and by the time we're meant to take the anxiety-filled love story with a straight face, you may well be rolling your eyes. The romance is between A and who he believes is also a world class burglar, Sunheri, played by Rai.
There's romantic interest for each of the three males, so Jai already has his pregnant wife Sweety (Rimi Sen) at home but is tempted by the charms of fellow cop Sonali Bose (Bipasha Basu) even though Ali is enamoured of her, yet as he's a comedy character and she's a straightlaced one, we know all too well he has no chance. Patience, Ali, patience. As I say, that first hour has nifty thrills where Jai works out that A is writing his signature letter across the globe by picking spots on the map that will join up to create his initial and Jai manages to let him slip through his fingers.
Yet after that, the character of A, who has an array of gadgets at his command which are on the wrong side of ridiculous, but diverting all the same, meets Sunheri and the love story rears its head, laying waste to all those feelings of goodwill that the film has engendered before. Really, their scenes kill the momentum stone dead, and what was a fun romp ends up in a tearstained game of Russian Roulette. There are compensations where the cops relocate to Brazil to catch A and end up meeting Sonali's more cheerful twin sister Monali, thus providing Ali with the love interest he craves, but with the songs only occasionally inserted almost as fantasy sequences and a severe lack of action in the second half, you can see why this fell so flat with so many. Maybe not quite as bad as some think, but still no classic. Music by Pritam and Salim Merchant.
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