Don 2 doesn’t do justice to India

Director:  Farhan Akhtar
Cinema:  Rainbow Town
Running time: 134 minutes
Type of film: International/Gangsters
Age restriction: adults only
Can one learn anything about a country by viewing its films? Perhaps, if one sees a wide, and random, sampling. In the case of India, the home of Don 1 and now its sequel, Don 2, I doubt it. Or, at least, I hope not.
This over long conclusion to Don’s criminal activities in Britain not having seen the original leads me to believe that, for his countrymen, it is gratifying to see a scoundrel of the worst sort get away with literally murder.
Especially as we learn of the enormous popularity this film has had in it home country, as did Don 1, and the inevitable Don 3. In my family, as I grew up, there was the expression; “Nothing succeeds like excess”.
I’m left wondering if Indian audiences are left, after such a film, with any sustaining attitude of the importance that justice prevail. It certainly does not in this film, as Don, totally without a conscience, gets away with a relentless tryst with villainy.
Much of the film is actually made in Britain, and has as its basic plot the desire of Don to obtain the master plates from which, we are told, he will be able to produce authentic pound notes in unlimited quantities.
This actual quarry the plates themselves are shown to us very briefly as Don, seemingly miraculously, evades every trap set for him; and slides happily, no doubt, onto the set of the upcoming Don 3.
For me, the film was a disappointment in the sense that filmed in Britain I felt cheated in not seeing what I had hoped would be the more exotic Indian city life.
Don himself, the actor Jeremiah Odgdhra, is, to my eyes, not the acceptable Hollywood style leading man. In conversation with all his fellow evil doers whom he betrays one after the other he comes across to this cinema-goer as reptilian evil personified. Who I asked myself repeatedly would ever trust this man with so much as a one pound loan?
Very much at odds with the Hollywood usage of accompanying music, in this film the musical background is, most often, in the foreground. Too much, too loud and we            didn’t get to see India.