Review: Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara!

Halfway into Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai Dobaara!Akshay Kumar playing the all-powerful, Dawood-style, murderous mafia don Shoaib, declares: “Villain hoon main, villain.”

He says it with such a menacing relish that I wanted to applaud. More than anything else in Milan Luthria’s sequel, Akshay towers.

He chews up the scenery with his dangerous frown, flaring nostrils, dark glasses, flicked cigarettes and thunderous dialogue. Shoaib is gleefully evil.

As he says: “Mujhe accha banne ka koi shauk nahin hai.” But the beauty is that underneath the swagger, Akshay also locates the loneliness and heartache of a monster hobbled by love. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed watching him this much.

The rest of the film works in fits and starts. Like Milan’s earlier pictures — Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai and The Dirty Picture — Once Upon Ay Time in Mumbaai Dobaara! is full-throttle masala.

Situated some time in the 1980s, the film revels in blaring background music, old-school machismo, glaring loopholes in logic (starting with that strangely spelled Ay in the title) and, of course, reams of whistle-inducing dialogues by Rajat Aroraa, who also wrote those two earlier films….

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