Sanjay Gadhvi 2004 India
I’ve really been getting into Bollywood in recent months and, as such, I’ve seen a lot from the Bachchan acting family consisting of patriarch Amitabh Bachchan, who is the biggest and perhaps best actor in Bollywood history, his wife, the actress Jaya Bhaduri, their son Abhishek and Abhishek’s wife, the exceptional Aishwarya Rai. I’ve seen Abhishek in several roles, among them romantic lead, dancer, thief, con man and even a Michael Corleone-style gangster/businessman in the good if mildly plagiaristic Sarkar and the much better sequel Sarkar Raj. Here he’s a policeman battling a gang of motorbike-riding thieves and is, as ever, good value. Also as ever not everyone agrees with me. When I first heard of this film I read a lot of reviews that said it was really really bad, like Hulk Hogan’s movie career bad, but I’m happy to state that I massively disagree. In fact it’s probably the most entertaining film I’ve seen in several months and that was at least in part due to the fact that, while it was utterly ludicrously ridiculous, it knew it was and it practically gloried in that absurdity and at several points even made fun of action movies, tough guy film stars and Bollywood itself, not least in implanting its own intermission sequence mid-movie, having a villain working under the assumed name Austin Powers and naming the main character’s wife Mrs Sweety Dixit, seemingly an affectionate swipe at 90’s star Madhuri Dixit. You can kind of guess the outlook of the film when you see the two English translations of the title Dhoom, either Blast or ROCK! Glorious. And Dhoom isn’t just an action movie or even just a parody, it takes in buddy comedy, crime, romance and, in its final sequence, even has a martial arts fight on top of a moving truck. It probably won’t win any worldwide awards any time soon but it’s just a lot of fun and, to quote my friend and fellow film blogger Milo Myage (http://hatefilminstantly.wordpress.com/) , “sometimes that’s all a film needs to do”. The only bad point is one that unfortunately seems to affect a lot of Indian DVD releases, poor subtitling, and, as a result, I'm quite literally on the point of starting a Society for the Prevention of Poor Subtitling. Just imagine, all those subtitles trapped there being forced to say the wrong things, poor buggers. Still, I can’t wait to watch the two sequels (apparently better than the original) and the in-production Dhoom 4 and now I wish I could be as cool and menacing as Abhishek simply by taking off my glasses. Usually I just fall over and bang into things. I’m cool.
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