Dum Maaro Dum

Bollywood has played Hollywood's hyperactive, overseas sibling for many years now, tenaciously nipping at the heels of its big brother by cranking out scads of local versions of reliable genres, replete with their individual style and flair. Bollywood movies are instantly recognizable as charmingly cheesy and naïve, a safe-haven for the once ubiquitous tropes of early Hollywood: the musical number, the hiss-worthy villain and the purely innocent hero/heroine. Yet, despite its best intentions, Bollywood has yet to achieve that breakout international hit, and the honeymoon period of the early '00s, which saw films like Lagaan and Devdas draw art house crowds and Academy Award nominations, has come and gone. Since that time, Bollywood has gone through a period of modernization, adapting itself to a changing, increasingly interconnected world, creating new films to appeal to a broader, and younger, audience. However, if Dum Maaro Dum is any indication, it's going in precisely the wrong direction. Dum Maaro Dum explores the story of a formerly crooked cop (Abhishek Bachchan), now on the straight-and-narrow after losing his wife in an automobile accident, trying to bring down a drug kingpin, a wide-eyed soccer player (Prateik Babbar) desperate to join his true love in America at university, but stymied by his lack of finances, and a DJ (Rana Daggubati) trying to prevent his fiancée from becoming trapped in the seedy and violent criminal underground. All three are entangled within the sun-soaked coastal paradise of Goa, one of India's most vibrant and tourist-friendly regions. Filled to the brim with Bollywood luminaries, Dum Maaro Dum is a movie simply in love with itself, but beneath all its self-satisfaction lays a hollow, risible, garish version of Hollywood's most simplistic dross. It's the kind of film that thinks every plot twist, or rather, every plot element, is fiendishly clever, and barring that, throws in all sorts of unnecessary visual grandstanding. Dum Maaro Dum is a simplistic soap opera at its core, regardless of how much fancy gunplay and jittery camerawork are on display. Hopelessly overlong (although at 130 minutes, brief by Bollywood standards), Dum Maaron Dum is a backwards, depressing, idiotic version of commercial Hollywood cinema, offering nothing new or original. The DVD package includes a making-of documentary and trailer.