As Nicole Kidman reminds every attendee of AMC theaters, we come to movies for magic. Without ripping off her entire monologue here, I, like countless others, deeply resonate with the siren song of spectacle that cinema presents us with, as exemplified this month by Dune 2. Or, if you would rather stream something at home and love annoying people by pretending to mishear them, Dhoom 2.
Available to stream on Prime Video, 2006’s Dhoom 2 was my introduction to Bollywood cinema. A sequel to director Sanjay Gadhvi’s action-comedy Dhoom, Dhoom 2 (you don’t have to watch the first, it’s fine) reunited Gadhvi with writer Vijay Krishna Acharya and stars Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra for a blockbuster Hindi film that did the absolute most, in the most 2006 way possible.
Dhoom 2 is a pretty straightforward affair, a story about hero cop Jai Dixit (Bachchan), his goofy sidekick Ali (Chopra), and their efforts to catch the legendary, very cool thief Aryan “Mr. A” Singh (Hrithik Roshan) on his latest crime spree. The appeal is in the excess. Dhoom 2 is among the most 2006 movies ever made, reading now (and at the time) as a direct response to Fast & Furious culture. An Indian response — perhaps even a love letter — to the stunt-heavy spectacle of then-modern cops-and-robbers blockbusters like XXX, Dhoom 2 is an ode to doing the most in every conceivable way, all with utter sincerity.
This is a movie that starts with a thief parachuting onto a moving train to steal Queen Elizabeth II’s crown (important note: Roshan plays both the thief and the queen), sand surfing away through the desert as the film’s industrial-cool opening dance number gets underway. It’s a movie where two characters flirt via a basketball match in the rain, where the suave Mr. A is interrupted by the hot lady thief Sunheri (Aishwarya Rai) as the soundtrack immediately coos about how sexy she is (which in turn is immediately followed by a dance number about how sexy she is). It’s got a recurring gag where Ali keeps imagining photos of his would-be life with every babe he meets, only to have them crashed by the much cooler (married?) Jai. Dhoom 2 loves fake masks more than the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, and improbable heists more than every Ocean film. My favorite gag/scheme involves Mr. A painting himself to look like a marble sculpture, covertly operating a drone to steal a diamond across the museum from him.
All of this, by the way, is from the first half of the movie.
If you’re a stranger to Indian blockbusters like I was watching this in the mid-aughts, Dhoom 2 is exhilarating; compared to modern American fare it still thrills even in the ways it has aged poorly. Is it the best introduction to Bollywood cinema? No. There are better movies than this, smarter movies, more cohesive ones. but if you want something propulsively cool, an introduction to international movies as Red Bull, you can’t get much better than Dhoom 2.
Dhoom 2 is streaming on Prime Video.
