Cast: Akshay kumar, Sonakshi Sinha, Imran Khan
Director: Milan Luthria
Run time: 160 Minutes
A large sized canvas, with glossier looks and added star power, but failing to realize the true essence of something as necessary as casting and trying to implicate the effective and power-laced dialogues in the previous movie, with just too much of an overdose here, is what Once upon a time in Mumbai Dobara is all about. Disappointing and something which you would never like to watch “dobara”.
On the already laid caricature of its predecessor and branding itself as the sequel, it made the hype it needed with added star power, to try and convert it to be another box-office success. Riding on the success of a previous hit, isn’t easy and this film presents a solid case demonstrating on how not to continue with a franchise, you could just ruin it all.
The plot shapes develops itself as a love triangle between Shoaib (Played by Akshay kumar), Jasmine (Played by Sonakshi Sinha), an aspiring actress coming to Mumbai and ending up becoming the interest of Don Shaoaib and Aslam(played by Imran khan), a loyal of Shoaib working for him from his childhood ends up being in love with Jasmeen as well. The conflict between the two of them for Jasmeen, with the backdrop of a territorial expansion and control over Mumbai and his increasing authority in cricket and films.
The plot resembles on the previous film, with the interchange of good-bad (Ajay-Emraan hashmi) to Bad-good(Akshay-Imran), presence of another item number like the disco number of Parda, this time featuring Hazel crowney, and trying to fit in the essence of OUATIM wherever he could, but failing to match up. This is disappointment for someone with his track record.
Talking about individual performances, Akshay is way out of shape and the character doesn’t approve of him in this shade, even though he hardly removes his shade in the movie, Imran khan is consist in giving out a college students’ performance here again, and Sonakshi Sinha just carries on with the motion except in the last scene where she does show some nerve, but by then all was over.
The biggest blunder which the movie commits is over the top acting by each and everyone, making you exclaim on the proximity of their loudness in expressing their characters in extremely melodramatic manner. The casting is terrible and hardly anyone gets any screen space other than the three leads, which have been put on a dialogue churning spree, with each sentence appearing to be studded with dialogues as if over-the-top ones are being distributed for free.
Director Milan Luthria, whose previous works boasts not only of depth in characters as well as provide space for scenes to speak, appears to be in a hurry. He races through scenes, with nothing but dialogues being machine gunned towards the audience.
The music isn’t anything great and there’s hardly any song that deserves any mention, although the scenes involving Sharjah/UAE has been captured beautifully.
The only scene providing the saving grace is the ending, providing depth which the whole movie couldn’t. maybe a different director, could give it a less glossier but a more intense approach and that would make it at least worth a watch.
I’ll highly advice you to excuse yourself from watching this, there’s nothing impressive out there and the weekend can be put to some better use.
I’m going with a very generous 1/5 for Once Upon a time for Mumbaai Dobara, you might wish to be let this “Once Upon a time…” fable remain there in “once upon a time…”.