Sunday 8 May 2011

Dum Maro Dum [2011]


Rohan Sippy quite surely has seen some world cinema, and has learnt about a few interesting filming techniques. But seeing his Dum Maro Dum, he seemed akin to a student of literature who might have memorised all the technical aspects about the language, maybe even the grandiloquent words, but has never learnt how to form a cohesive sentence. The film follows the lives of a number of disparate characters – an angry cop (Abhishek Bachchan), a sad musician, a naïve young guy and a self-destructive lady (Bipasha Basu), among others, all brought together by the prevalent underground drug-culture in India’s party-capital, Goa. Bachchan did a good job as the head of the team to clean Goa of its mess, and ends up going into collision-mode with the drug lords. A plethora of twists and turns later, however, the film turned into more of a brainless cat-and-mouse game than an intelligent thriller. For the film to be successful, it was essential for the director to invest time in building the atmosphere and making Goa the symbolic fifth character of the film. Unfortunately for us film goers, that never happened, and so a premise that held a lot of promise, was instead turned into a mindless, hyper-stylised and over-edited series of unrelated montages. And by the way, legendary composer R.D. Burman would surely be turning in his grave listening to the bastardisation of his iconic tribute to the hippy era – the Hare Rama Hare Krishna song that game the movie its name.








Director: Rohan Sippy
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery
Language: Hindi
Country: India

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