Don 2, both plastic and explosive

We've come a long way, baby. The first time we met Ethan Hunt in 1996's Mission Impossible, our local movie theatres were playing an Akshay Kumar  actioner in which he mud-wrestled with Rekha  and fought an Undertaker knock-off. Fifteen years on, Tom Cruise  comes to India  to promote Hunt's latest adventure, seven days after which we find Shah Rukh Khan  hanging upside down in a chamber with a pressure-controlled floor -- just like Hunt did in that first Brian De Palma film. And here's the cool thing: Farhan Akhtar  makes it just as slick.

So yes, a very impressively produced film indeed. Akhtar's hero has never looked better -- as evidenced by the lovely girl in the seat next to mine gasping louder and louder -- and, unencumbered by the lack of a classic film to be compared against, both director and actor are visibly liberated, having a blast making this film about a slimy (but shiny) antagonist who wants nothing to do with redemption. And this is vital, for in a film where it's clear that the stakes of the story are lower than the costs of its production, what hooks the audience is the opportunity to see an assured director and a superstar genuinely enjoying themselves -- like Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney  in the Ocean's Eleven series, for example. (By the by, that also happens to be the only other example I can come up with for a remade classic that spawned its own independent franchise.)

Imagine, however, Ocean's Three. Where Clooney was given not just his own lines, but all of Brad's and Matt's and Elliot Gould's, leaving supporting actors to stand and stare while he did his own thing. I'd have to admit that still sounds charming on paper, and this version of it could have been, if only Shah Rukh Khan hadn't also decided to boast about the fact that he has the best lines. There is a degree of over-the-top acting suited to a role and genre like this, but Khan slaughters his lines (and Akhtar's given him some fine, fun ones) by deliberating over each of them and delivering them fatally overbaked, pausing long enough mid-punchline to sneer and smirk, and then waiting after the line to allow us a moment to laugh or whistle. That self-sure smugness asphyxiates the dialogue and robs it and Don, the character, of his coolth. Leaving us with a good-looking caricature of an actor, one that needs now to be reined in.