We Need to Talk: Dhoom 2
So, this weekend I saw Splice. I will be talking about it tomorrow, but it’s just not the sort of blog entry I want to face on a Monday. Especially since I also saw Dhoom 2 this weekend.
Dhoom 2 stars Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, who had been paired to great effect in Jodhaa Akbar (despite Aishwarya’s lack of actual acting ability). I thought, “Well, they did well in the other one. Let’s check out Dhoom 2!”
Do you guys remember the first Mission: Impossible movie, when everyone had latex masks on all the time and they spent four hours just double-crossing each other and jumping around pulling off latex masks to reveal other latex masks and shooting bullets in an arc and running around and pulling off other people’s latex masks, and you spent the whole movie thinking, “What is wrong with these awful people in this movie I don’t understand?”
The maker of Dhoom 2 looked at that movie and said, “This is missing two things: dance numbers, and a man dressed up to look like the Queen. I can fix this.”

And so, Dhoom 2 was born, and the opening scene of Dhoom 2 is Hrithik Roshan parachuting down to a desert-crossing train (without being seen), dressing as the Queen Mother, stealing the Crown, and sandboarding to safety.
Then, he has a musical number in a nightclub telling you what the themes of the movie are. (Bollywood, don’t ever change.)
The plot swiftly becomes one of those movies where the Cop on a Mission and the Thief on a Mission do a lot of homoerotic fixating on one another and put a woman in the middle just so it doesn’t look too gay – in this case, the double-agent thief played by Aishwarya. It almost works!

…almost.
(And please note that in the video below, half the time he’s staring longingly off-camera, Abhishek Bachchan is there. Just saying.)
There’s also a comedy-relief cop, and a pregnant harpy wife, and a fun-loving tropical lady, and a lady cop who’s been tracking the thief dude for years but immediately gets the case taken off her hands by Cop on a Mission, and is never heard from again, and Hrithik and Aishwarya do a lot of looking at each other in slow motion, and one of the heist scenes involves a lucky placement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It’s just that kind of movie.
A lot of it, I admit, goes beyond fun-cheeseball and into painful-cheeseball, so if you’re looking to save time and wince-hours then you should probably just skip to Hrithik’s scenes all the time. His cheese is at least hilarious. (You’ll notice in the video below that sometimes he has a goatee and long hair – this is considered one of his many disguises. When he finally shows up on the mountainside with the short hair, she’s completely bowled over at who it is, even though all he really did was shave.)

Seriously, after this she talks to him when he has a fake goatee and some long hair on – they have an entire game of basketball together! – and when he shows up with the short hair she’s like, “OH MY GOD IT’S YOU.” She’s not the sharpest sandwich at the picnic.
Hrithik really impressed me in Jodhaa Akbar (which I swear I will talk about this week, I promise!), which was a Super Serious Drama that I straight-up enjoyed and thought was a quality film, so this was…a change. But he sells it the way any good movie star sells whatever movie they’re in, and his scenes are far and away better than any of the rest of that movie.
Fun fact: this movie has a kiss between Aishwarya and Hrithik (a Bollywood no-no), and it landed the movie in court under charges of indecency and being derogatory to women. Don’t know how that turned out; I do know that in Jodhaa Akbar there is a semi-kiss that seemed like a very intentionally choreographed “kiss my ass,” and I’m guessing this is where that came from.
I cannot recommend this movie, as it is so painfully cheeseball that it is largely unwatchable. It is, however, no worse than Octopussy. (What could be?) So if you are in the mood to laugh at an action movie and hum along to the occasional musical number, this might fit the bill.
I do know that, if anything DOES make this movie worth watching, cracking up at how much the camera loves Hrithik Roshan is that thing. It happens early, it happens often, and it happens to be hilarious.
Best part: I was thinking about writing this up, and I thought, “Well, it won’t be the same without a compilation of Hrithik Roshan walking in slow-motion towards the camera with his shirt unbuttoned and his scarf fluttering in the wind, but where the hell am I going to find that?”
Turns out someone made it, and put it to a love song. Thank you, internet. Thank you for everything.



















