Don 2

Don 2 has a one-point agenda: to be stylish. And it has one big flaw: Shah Rukh Khan who is completely off the mark as Don. I returned to watch him on the big screen after nearly a decade, the last film I saw of him was Mohabbatein, but the lad hasn't changed one bit. He is still a horrendous actor. Yes he hams and chuckles all the bloody time, but the worst is how he makes a crooked face and smirks thinking it stylish. Style sits uneasy on him because he tried to perform it. He cannot lend a style to a character because he cannot hold himself back. One wonders how the only good actor of the film, one who takes the screen for nearly five minutes, would have played Don: Hritik.

The film takes after James Bond much more than other Hollywood films, but SRK would have done well to watch some Brosnan films. The entire vocabulary of the film is modeled upon Hollywood productions, can be best spotted in its copy-pasted witticisms. Don 2 is a performance of provincial aspirations and tricks in global space, it proudly subverts Berlin's cityscape and its personnel, treats them like poor white trash, as Don penetrates the virginal spaces. Priyanka Chopra is so awful that I pray it is her last film. In a way, the film downsizes average human intelligence to make Don seem like a super-computer. The schema is borrowed from video-gaming and in doing so, Farhan conveniently forgets that characters must have motivations to live and die for such stunts.

Don 2 is pointless because it extends what was finished with Amitabh's Don, for no particular reason. It stylizes what was an outstanding achievement in style as well as intensity. It fails to understand why Amitabh's Don had such a strong and lingering taste, it fails to address the genius of that screenplay, or the delivery of its punchlines. Amitabh was doubtless the last super-star. SRK is not a patch on him.

Stars often perform excess and get away with it, the reason why SRK won't is that he inhabits a matrix over-stylized for his silly smirks and fails to come to terms with it, let alone lend any meaning to it.