Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara

The sequel has lost the charm of the original film

A sequel for a retro movie is a bad idea if you don’t have the original cast available. The first film worked because both Ajay Devgn and Emraan Hashmi fit in well as Haji Mastan and his ruthless prodigy Dawood Ibrahim. They were familiar with speech patterns of 1970s Hindi movies and are decent actors, though, of course, the best actor ever to play Haji Mastan was Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar (1975).

Dobaara has got good art direction and an actress, Sonakshi Sinha, who could be credible as a 1970s aspiring star, even though her look is more 1950s. What is interesting about both the original and the sequel is how it ties the underworld and the movie business in Mumbai into a Gordian knot that, perhaps, was untied only recently. In the first film, the Mastan character, depicted as a romantic soul despite his sordid profession, falls in love with an established actress.

In this movie, the Dawood Ibrahim character, Shoaib Khan (Akshay Kumar), has no redeeming features whatsoever. He promotes the girl he likes in the film industry purely as a transactional favour. When Jasmine Mirza (Sonakshi Sinha) refuses his advances, he destroys her career, rampaging through the movie set she is on and then presenting her with an offer she dare not refuse. This is why the film, despite its reasonably well created atmosphere, does not work. With the central character so one-dimensional, he loses all audience empathy.

Shoaib’s henchman, Aslam (Imran Khan), on the other hand, is ‘Goody two-shoes’, and that, for a gangster, can be pretty unprofessional. He and Jasmine are completely naive and though it is true that the 1970s was not the age of cellphones and Facebook, it seems unbelievable that they are completely unaware of the triangular relationship they share with their dreadful mentor. That said, one song and its picturisation is memorable—Ye tune kya kiya by Javed Bashir.

Dawood IbrahimHaji Mastansequel