Film review: Dhoom3, an Indian Circus with ‘not so’ Great performance

Money is currency to power, and bank that stores this power is supposedly the powerhouse. The people, therefore, who run a bank are exceedingly powerful. To them, the job of lending and borrowing is entirely guided by sole interest of obtaining profit. That inherent nature of banker allows him to chase un-apologetically the sheer financial profit giving no importance to issues like social justice. Hence, bank as institution holds the monopoly of violence of various nature to subject especially on its borrower to extract the payment of any unpaid loan; which is why certain sections of the western middle class call bank an “empire of vampire”.

The theme of Dhoom3 is inspired by the above expressed perception about the bankers. The story starts with a sordid event where the Western Bank of Chicago decides to shut down a circus house (The Great Indian Circus House) owned by Iqbal Khan, played by Jackie Shroff  because the latter fails to repay the loan. That leads to the suicide of the owner of the circus house leaving his two young sons, Shahir and Shamar, orphan. The plot revolves around these two twin brothers played by Amir Khan, whose sole mission in life becomes to rob, and then destroy all Chicago based banks to take vengeance for his innocent father’s death. In their self-proclaimed crusade against the banking system, they turn out to be surprisingly victorious so much so that the rich bankers of Chicago end up developing cold feet against them. It appears highly unrealistic and droll to see that Chicago police have been shown being helpless in nabbing the super thief of Indian origin leading to a situation where they sought help from Indian police. That allowed the entrance of the Indian super cop, Jay Dixit played by Abhishek Bachan and his no-good, girl chasing, tapori colleague, Ali played by Uday Chopra into the plot. Both of them are called to Chicago to play a key role in tracing the super-smart thief. Though not so essential but it’s required to add that the story accommodated a female protagonist too, played by Katrina Kaif whose only business in the story was to perform acrobatic dance on the stage of magic, and finally to create a quite repairable rupture between the twin brothers. In the end, the twin brothers get caught by Jay Dixit et al; but instead of surrendering to police they choose to commit suicide like their father.

The film starts, and ends with Amir Khan. Vijay Krishna Acharya, director and writer of the film, has left very less scope for other characters to play any influential role. Abhishek and Uday are made to play their usual characters but this time with less charm and dynamism vis-à-vis previous sequels of the film. Katrina Kaif seems to be forcibly inducted into the script just to fill the vacuum of an unavoidable ingredient of Bollywood films which is glamour. That won’t be wrong to say that in Dhoom3 there’re three characters, one main actor which is Amir Khan; and two supporting characters are his high-tech motorbike and the Chicago city itself.

  So far as the script is concerned, the primary job of a story-teller is to polarize the emotional orientation of viewer in at least two directions, good and bad or rather less good. It helps a narrator to navigate the story effectively, and to take it to its logical conclusion. In case of Dhoom3, the story lacks nuanced approach of character bifurcation in between the negative and positive pole. In such a story, the role of a script writer becomes tough to justify any act or event performed by a particular character that leads to ambivalence in viewer’s mind. Nevertheless in Dhoom3, that ambivalence was watered down thanks to the presence of popular stars. In general, Indian cine-goers do not look for a constructive character pay but they rather wish to see their favorite stars on screen doing usual stuffs. Secondly, the story does not show much scope for a sequential narrative content either; because apart from the central character, no other protagonists need any especial explanation of their personage as the audience is very much familiar with them considering the fact it’s a sequel film.  That probably may be the reason Acharya neglected the story narration, and entirely focused upon cliff-hanging stunts and ungracious display of car crashing events that drag the movie to its end. 

 The film showed a nice piece of cinematography. As the theme permitted the cinematographer and director to use bright coulour and acute light which was done very magnificently. The challenge for the choreographer was supposedly to make Amir Khan do the tap and ballet dance with dozens of tall limbed dancers  on an immensely, spacious stage. The director has used camera quite faultlessly by keeping a safe distance between the actor and his fellow dancers, and by showing the spectacle from much above the ground. In a nutshell, Acharya as director may have succeeded in stretching a short story up to three hours but for that credit goes to cinematographer, stunt director and above all the star-power of Amir Khan.   

To sum up, Dhoom3 is a quasi-entertaining film that can be seen once by siting with the entire family as unlike other movies of these days, it does not have any shoddy, double meaning songs accompanied with indecent, smutty scene; nor does it offer any unpalatable display of bullet and blood. It’s a one-time watch that may garner the commercial success by cashing in-on the brand of being sequel of ‘Dhoom’ and thanks to the aggressive marketing style of Yash-Raj films. The audience should go to theatre to watch an expansive film with full of adventurous tour de force but he should not expect thrill and excitement of the same degree which he may have had while watching the previous sequels of Dhoom otherwise he’d have more disappointment and less pleasure.