Dhoom: 3 (2013)

Today on Movie Russian Roulette, Alex takes a look at how Bollywood makes their big-budget action movies. He is simultaneously impressed and horrified. This is Dhoom: 3. And its trailer is almost better than the movie.

Not to be confused with Doom.

Overview: The third installment of what is apparently a big blockbuster series on the subcontinent, Dhoom: 3 takes viewers to the gritty streets of Chicago, where the son of a circus-running immigrant is bent on having his revenge on the "corrupt" (more on that later) bank that forced his father into suicide. Action scenes ensue.

Now, I haven't seen the rest of the series, but I do have a vague knowledge of general Bollywood tropes, having seen... well, one other movie in the same vein. It's honestly a weak spot in my otherwise clearly stellar film knowledge. So I have no idea how this connects to any overall plot, but it seems pretty self-contained.

Our protagonist is the antiheroic rogue Sahir Khan. We're given a glimpse at how awesome this kid is when, at the age of 10, he fights six teenagers trying to rob him, wins, then parkours up a building to escape while heavy guitar riffs play. I swear to god Robert Hamburger directed this. Disaster soon strikes for young Sahir as a bank threatens to foreclose on his beleaguered father's circus, where Sahir is the secret weapon and finest act. They put on a special show for three of the bank's top men to convince them they can entertain audiences and make good on their payments... but the bank doesn't budge and forecloses.

Thirteen-odd years later, Sahir has somehow reopened the circus and become its new ringman, but by night (and sometimes broad goddamned daylight) robs the Western Chicago Bank blind to carry out his revenge. To stop this sneaky thief, the Chicago PD grabs two cops, Jai and Alai, from Mumbai in hopes they can haul him on. This sets  in motion some classic cat-and-mouse, chase scenes, and a plot twist so stupid I'll be amazed if I can keep this review under 2,000 words. We'll see.

Notable moments/quotes: The movie begins by showing us Sahir's childhood in Chicago in 1990. While on the whole the setting feels very American, they go a little too hard for the nostalgic, innocent feeling and (teenage thugs aside) the childhood scenes feel like they're taking place in a Norman Rockwell painting. Picturesque snow coats the ground, humble little mom-and-pop shops dot the streets... it's enough to make a bitter, borderline-alcoholic reviewer vomit.

In the initial action scene, Sahir (without a mask on) is running down the side of a building as money rains from the sky. Guitar riffs wail in the background as he lands on the sidewalk and darts into a van. The cops quickly surround the van, only for Sahir to burst from the back of a van on a motorcycle as the guitar riffs turn it up to 11. A few minutes later, mid-chase, he slides under a passing semi, missing its tires by only a few seconds, Matrix-style. Not long after this, a motorcycle cop is neck-and-neck with him, until Sahir kicks him into a handy neighborhood Newspaper Stand. (Yes, they actually have a newspaper stand named Newspaper Stand. Just in case you were confused.)

"Eyes on the road, not our terrible props."

Later in the same chase, he drives his motorcycle on a zipline across a street, avoiding an oncoming train by inches.

After that amazing action scene, the filmmakers wisely realized they needed to let everyone's action-ons (which is like a hard-on in your red-blooded AMERICAN FREEDOM BRAIN) calm down a little. So, in true Bollywood fashion, Sahir has a dance number with a bunch of people who never appear in the movie again. (This is a common trope in Bollywood films... they love their musicals, apparently.)

Just after that scene has had exactly enough time to lose the American audience, we cut to India, where idiot cop Alai is bungling the arrest of some kind of crime lord. He's surrounded by goons, unarmed... but his partner Jai bursts through a brick wall on some kind of three-wheeled taxi and rams the crowd out of the way. Another amazing chase scene quickly wins back the American audience by breaking no fewer than six brick walls in the process while driving on roofs, the crime boss literally teleports off-camera to the high ground, Jai meets the crime boss for midair combat Scott Pilgrim-style, and other things that make me so excited that I disregard all parallelism.

Back in the U.S., Mr. Anderson, the bank's top man, is demanding answers from the CPD's detective on the scene. "So who's been robbing us?"
Cop of the year: "It's a thief, sir. That's all I can say at this point."

At a scant 36 minutes in (this movie is three numbing hours long), we flashback to the exact scene with Sahir's childhood tragedy with the bank. You know, in case we forgot.

Mr. Anderson: "We're bankers. Everyone hates us."

can confirm

Sahir, whose face is somehow unknown to the cops (MUCH more on this later), offers his services to Jai and Alai's investigation, claiming the thief was a mysterious clown from his past. He uses this opportunity to teach them about circus slight-of-hand and illusion, as well as case the next branch of the bank.

Sahir and Alai motorcycle joust in one chase scene. It's every bit as amazeballs as it sounds.

Later in the same chase, Sahir is surrounded on the bridge. And then... well... this happens. I really don't have words for it. Just take a couple minutes and bask in the batshit glory of this scene.

After fouling up a chase, Jai and Alai are taken off the case. This of course means they not only stay in the country but continue to pursue the case. Mr. J: “Till now, we were bound by rules and protocol.”

Sahir, at one point, literally ties Jai to rollercoaster tracks. I guess no railroad tracks were available, eh?
Sahir: "I'd happily watch you die, but I have a bank to destroy. Enjoy the ride."

can snidely whiplash be a running joke? oh boy!

My thoughts: I'll be the first to admit that I do not like musicals. I think they're hokey, break any sense of immersion whatsoever, and lead to my theatre friends in college listening to and singing along to nothing. But. Musical soundtracks!

this piece of shit didn't help either

I had a theatre professor in college who I respected greatly who loved musicals. His defense of them was that "When people get emotional, they raise their voices and yell. When that's not enough, they sing." While music does get emotion across, I disagree with this sentiment; however, if you have more patience for this art than I, you'll be less bothered.

As this is a Bollywood film, there are quite a few musical numbers. I feel I should mention this right away to save any like myself, who will find only pain and suffering in these schlockfests.

Anyway, I have a few issues with this movie, as you can no doubt guess. It's on this blog, after all. While its chase scenes are delightfully outlandish, it, like so many other movies, fails in one of the most critical areas: common sense.

Sahir often carries out his daring robberies in broad daylight, without a mask on. The first traffic camera he came across would be able to pin this guy to the crime. The least competent police force in the world could have had him indicted at that point. "But, wait!" the movie says, desperate for some obscure bullshit to save itself with. "It wasn't just Sahir doing the robberies. His identical twin with autism helped him!"

To its credit, the movie does suggest that their father literally kept Sahir's twin, Samar, hidden from the world because of the boys' ability to "disappear and reappear" on stage through careful manipulation, and the movie's more emotional moments suggest that Samar was kept from everything. However, this doesn't explain things either. Is there no record of Samar's birth? No official records? You'd think that would make him a better cover for Sahir, right? Well, actually, it's the opposite. If the entire world didn't know about this other guy, the instant they had any security footage, traffic cams, etc. they could presumably pin the robberies on Sahir, since, as previously mentioned, this master thief doesn't wear a godsdamned mask. The level of idiocy this movie assumes on the part of its audience is downright insulting, since this is supposed to be set in the modern day. Sahir even has some kind of Minority Report-style VR blueprint maker for his heist plans. So why, oh why, don't the cops or the bank have even the most basic of security systems?

Now, let's return to the twin, shall we? While it's never outright stated, it's made clear through (admittedly) stellar performance that Samar has at least a some manner of disorder, since he's shown to have a near-perfect memory but struggles with basic social skills. The key to the cops' eventual plan to take down Sahir basically hinges entirely on exploiting Samar's condition. This made me deeply uncomfortable, particularly because Samar starts the movie as a pretty awesome character; as a child he's shown to be a phenom who outdoes Sahir in nearly every aspect, but by the time he's an adult, he's a barely functional, stuttering mess. He can still do chase scenes with the best of them, but... I dunno, man. Maybe it's just a different cultural standard, and having Samar be this way added some undertones of comedy for their domestic audience, but to me it just felt mean. Now, I engage in lots of mean-spirited humor here on the blog, but my targets are professionals who at least profess to know what they're doing. I've read enough accounts from people involved in the making of bad movies to know that sometimes, it's not even clear to the average actor when he or she is even in a bad film while it's being shot. Hell, I could even see the director or producer getting too into the project and losing perspective. I feel no shame taking potshots at and insulting the intelligence of these folks. But when a movie feels like it's doing the same to a character on the basis of a disability that might have been written into the character only for the sake of the joke? Not cool, man. Not cool.

Does having more compassion for a fictional character being mocked than real people that I mock make me a hypocrite? Eh, whatever, have a shot of Sahir wielding a torch on a motorcycle.

AMERICA... er... INDIA

Beyond character issues, I also take issue with the movie's use of bankers as bad guys. It's a common trope these days, but my issue is how they use them. For those of you who don't know, my day job is a foot soldier for the 1% in one of America's largest banks. So let me say upfront that a lot of these upper-level bank types are exactly the type of scum films should be taking down. Way better than having another sinister Russian, smug Brit, or some other stock racial type be the baddie.

However, I know from my experience that in this day and age the government has gone a long way towards reigning these bastards in. Banks now have miles and miles of government red tape and protections to go through before they can repeat some of the some disasters that blew apart the American housing market or other such things. And that brings us to the foreclosure that sets this whole movie off.

In Illnois, anyone undergoing foreclosure has a period where the property can be "redeemed" or brought current by paying the money they're behind, during which the bank has to sit on its hands and do nothing. Under Illnois Statute 15-1603, the borrower basically has 7 months within the first legal filing to begin foreclosure to do this. The law does stipulate shorter timeframes for commerical property, but as we see in the movie's introduction, Sahir's family lives there, so with reasonable effort it might be considered "residential real estate" under the state law. Now, we aren't told just how long Sahir's father was behind on the mortgage, but even before the Dodd-Frank Act was passed in the U.S. in 2010 that added a lot of protections for people borrowing for their homes and tied banks' hands in many needed ways, it still cost banks a great deal of money to foreclose. The common view today is that since the banks often end up selling or owning the homes that they make money, but I know firsthand this is not the case. Foreclosure puts someone out of their home, but since banks have to be absolutely certain that all laws are followed, the bank chews a lot of legal fees, sometimes keeping local lawyers employed for years as court battles drag on. Therefore, banks have lots of financial incentive to work out a deal with any people who have fallen behind, since banks want you to keep making your mostly-interest payments on time like a good little cash cow.

This doesn't always happen, but regardless, the bank would have had to make some effort to work with Mr. Khan. Even if he had exhausted all possibilities, he could have declared bankruptcy, refinanced the mortgage... the list goes on. ANYWAY, I know none of that financial system shit would make for an interesting movie, but the film seems to portray it as "Well, you're a few payments behind, so go fuck yourself, we're taking the theatre that is also your house." Banks do plenty of shady things that you could portray in fiction to show they're the bad guys. Why make things up when reality gives you so much ammo to begin with? For all we know, Mr. Khan was just a scumbag who was too cheap to pay his goddamned bills.

"I seek revenge for my father making poor business decisions."

In any event, I should wrap this up before I blather on even more about banking stuff that most people won't care about or incite a riot for sort of defending the worst profession in the U.S. This movie is long, over-indulges in musicals, but also features some fun buddy-cop chase scene heist movie action. If you're curious about how Bollywood does action and don't mind reading subtitles, you could do worse. Any movie with motorcycle jousting is at least worth getting to half-mast.

I give this movie a Nic Cage Visits the Declaration of Independence out of five. Face the books!