Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbaai Dobaara!'
U/A; Action-drama
Director: Milan Luthria
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Sonakshi Sinha, Imran Khan
Ratings: 
There is a brilliant scene in this film. Akshay Kumar (as the dreaded
don Shoaib Khan) after killing a rival on a busy street, walks into a
police station and walks out unrecognised, with his freedom and his
wicked charm intact. This one bright scene actually works against the
film. It tells us what this film could have been. It also tells us that
one or two stray good scenes or one or two relevant dialogues can't make
a good film, when it is preceded and proceeded by a whole lot of
brainless mess.When a supposedly dreaded don (Akshay plays Shoaib Khan, taking on from Emraan Hashmi in the film's prequel) has to go blah blah insisting on how powerful he is, when the dialogues are cheesier than forwarded SMSes and when the lead actors are struggling so hard to appear convincing, you know this film is not taking you anywhere.
Akshay's Shoaib is reigning in Dubai and comes back to Mumbai to get it back under his control. Aslam (Imran Khan) is his henchman and as luck would have it, the two fall for the same woman, Jasmine (Sonakshi Sinha). The woman is selectively daft. She confuses intermediate with intercourse but she gives gyaan to rank strangers about the goodness of the heart. In the meanwhile, the powerful Don is also struggling to fight one of his rivals, Rawal (Mahesh Manjrekar, who looks and behaves as menacing as a bank clerk).
The don, who's out to conquer the city, is so busy trying to conquer the woman of his dreams instead, that his so-called terror is served only as an insipid side dish.
Rajat Arora's dialogues were breath-taking, for all the wrong reasons. Writing smart dialogues to fit the script is one thing, but forcibly squeezing in "clever" sounding dialogues is another thing. I can almost visualise Rajat giving himself a high-five every time he came up with lines like, "Jisne doodh me nimbu daala paneer uska" or "Zubaan ki chuppi pyar ki pappi lene nahi deti", but no sir, in the context of the movie, it only ends up being cringe-worthy or at best, unintentionally hilarious. And when a tapori (played by Imran), who otherwise struggles with English, says hamare Dhande me ek "saying" hai, you know the writer was more concerned about sounding clever than sticking to common sense.
Akshay playing an unapologetically bad man sounds like a fantastic idea, only if there was better direction and a script to back it. What a waste.
