From the archive: "Don"

Shah Rukh Khan reprises his Paheli trick of attempting two roles in the convoluted gangster thriller Don, one of Bollywood's biggest hits of 2006, playing first the baddest cocaine runner in all Asia, and then his doppleganger, a provincial clown recruited by a rogue police inspector to bring down "the Don"'s empire. As a way for Khan to stretch himself within safe parameters, Don is carefully calibrated: he establishes the Don's villainous credentials by killing off one of his female co-stars surprisingly early, before spending the rest of the film as the devout, devoted father figure audiences might still easily root for. The film picks up in its third hour when the actor's usual romantic-heroic personality is finally allowed to impose itself on what's essentially a great big tangle of a plot, with a nice comic sequence at a wedding the double and his sidekick (Priyanka Chopra) gatecrash while on the lam.

Director Farhad Akhtar ploughs through a number of spectacular locations, from Paris to Kuala Lumpur, keeping up a rate of one car or foot chase every ten minutes, and delivering one terrific mid-air fight over a parachute, but there's a tiredness to the way everything comes down to a squabble over a computer disc containing the smuggling ring's secrets, and it ends with a very silly twist that takes almost half an hour to explain. In the end, it feels more like a mishmash of higher-profile films the filmmakers have enjoyed - elements are lifted from Scarface, Infernal Affairs, True Identity, The Vanishing, Swordfish and Con Air - than it does a film in its own right.

(January 2007)

Don 2 opens in cinemas nationwide today. In other news, I think you should always be wary when a review suggests "the film picks up in its third hour".