Dishoom Movie Review

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A star Indian batsman is kidnapped 36 hours ahead of a make-or-break match. The external affairs ministry in Delhi rushes a badass cop to a place “somewhere in the Middle East” to lead the manhunt to find both the missing cricketer and the mysterious captor.

Sounds super exciting? On paper, it does. It definitely is an unusual plotline for a Hindi film. But any novelty that Rohit Dhawan’s Dishoompossesses ends right there.

It is an action-packed buddy film in which both John Abraham and Varun Dhawan, playing a bumbling police department rookie who is reduced to running errands for his exploitative boss and seeks liberation and greater glory, are pretty much stuck in a rut.

Abraham, as always, makes a fair fist of playing a dishy hunk who broods endlessly and revels in scoffing at the world. He growls rather than speaks.

Dhawan, too, is the boyish prankster that he has always been on the screen, a man blessed with clean-cut charm.

Dishoom opens in a packed cricket arena where we watch the aforementioned champion batter, Viraj Sharma (Saqib Saleem), make mincemeat of opposition bowlers.

Real-life retired cricketers Pommie Mbangwa and Akash Chopra provide the running commentary while the Indian team coach (Mohinder Amarnath, no less) barks instructions to his wards.

This, the audience is told, was the semi-final. The all-important final is two days away.

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