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Quarter Century: How 'Dhoom' Gave Bollywood Its Own 'Mission: Impossible'
How Hindi cinema got fast and fabulous when 'Dhoom' hit screens.
The mark of a heist film that’s done its job well is one that convinces you to explore a life in crime — albeit only for a few hours. Let’s look at Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series — George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon scheming to empty the vaults of Las Vegas casinos in well-cut suits, trench coats, turtlenecks and resort wear. Or the flamboyance of the speeding cars and bikes in the Fast & Furious franchise. There’s an inherent sexiness in these films that makes you go: now that’s a life I could get used to.
Hindi cinema tried its hand in this space for the first time in 2004 with Dhoom, starring Abhishek Bachchan, Uday Chopra and John Abraham, and directed by the late Sanjay Gadhvi. The film, which later went on to becoming a full-blown franchise, was created by the most unlikely production house, Yash Raj Films (YRF). Till then, YRF purely stood for love, romance, drama, relationships and values. The deadliest stunt we got was actresses dancing on snow-capped mountains in chiffon saris.
Producer and filmmaker Aditya Chopra, who was taking over the reins of the company from his father Yash Chopra, felt it was time to up the stakes. He realised there was a need for speed and bad boys to re-invent their image. In the Netflix documentary The Romantics, a tribute to Yash Raj Films, the famously reclusive filmmaker explains his vision behind Dhoom. “I wanted to combine Manmohan Desai and Michael Bay,” he explained. Both these filmmakers are celebrated for making films that are preposterously entertaining. Speaking about the impact of Dhoom on the diaspora, Canadian YouTuber Lilly Singh went on to explain in the documentary that this film finally gave desi kids like her a chance to say, “God! This is our Mission: Impossible.”
Though Dhoom was heavily derivative of its Hollywood counterparts in this genre, Aditya’s experiment worked. Like a good student, he managed to replicate all the tropes of a heist film efficiently: cool bikes, an impossibly attractive villain (Abraham) riding them, a Bo Derek–esque bikini moment with Esha Deol, a mole planted amongst the bad guys and a tense scene where the investigating cop (Bachchan) and conman come face to face. To this he added what Bollywood does best, a Mumbai tapori character (Uday Chopra), a killer soundtrack by Pritam and frequent dance numbers. The film opens with Rimi Sen dancing in a pink towel to seduce her cop husband. There’s also a song “Salaame” right before the climax where Deol’s character, a con artist herself, is doing the salsa with two investigating officers. Now that’s something no Mission: Impossible or Fast & Furious film could pull off.
Dhoom was a risk, but a sort of low-stakes one. It was still early days for Bachchan and Abraham as actors. They hadn’t seen success in their last few films. “I spent more on the bikes than them,” said Aditya in The Romantics. Dhoom was not just their biggest bona fide box-office hit, but it went on to become something much larger. There were news reports of bike sales going up post the release. I remember how the catchy “Dhoom Machale” jingle became everyone’s mobile ringtone overnight. In fact, only a few weeks ago there was a clip of Prince Charles being welcomed to a ceremony at Westminster Abbey to the tune of the Dhoom title track. The video posted by Shree Muktajeevan Swamibapa Pipe Band, an Indian ensemble, went instantly viral, with desi fans reacting to it with a mix of pride and humour.
That people wanted more of Dhoom was a no-brainer. Over the second and third films of the franchise, released in 2006 and 2013 respectively, the cast got starrier, the beach bods more chiselled, the locations went from Bandra (Mumbai) to Brazil, and the plots got more ludicrous. By the third instalment, Katrina Kaif was pirouetting in the air and Aamir Khan was running down a skyscraper in broad daylight.
But it didn’t matter. In a recent interview with the YouTube channel Chalchitra Talks, actor Arjun Kapoor reminisced about watching Dhoom 2 at a theatre with his jaw dropped to the floor. The film starred Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai as thieves, and Bachchan and Uday Chopra reprised their roles as cops. “There were many beautiful women in the film, but I was lusting after Hrithik Roshan,” he said. Kapoor spoke for so many of us who rushed to the theatre to watch Roshan as the hot bad guy. There’s a scene in which he quite literally looks like a work of art. Roshan, who goes just by the letter “A” in the film, is in a museum disguised as one of the statues on display, staging the theft of a precious gem with the help of what looks like an iPad in his hand. As Kapoor explained, “It’s a magic trick…how you convince people not to think about logic all the time.”
Roshan sure did a fine job of distracting us from asking logical questions. As did Rai, styled in bikini tops and miniskirts by costume designer Anaita Shroff Adajania, and bathed in several layers of bronzer. Her character Sunehri was… odd — a small-time thief who speaks like a schoolgirl. But when she and Roshan matched steps to the reprised “Dhoom Machale” track, it ceased to matter.
Today, Hindi cinema has a bunch of successful big-ticket franchises: Bhool Bhulaiyaa, and Rohit Shetty’s Cop universe and Golmaal series, to name a few. YRF is also building a Spy universe, and since 2004 has explored deeper and darker themes in the action space. That said, Dhoom was one of the first to get the beats of a successful franchise right. It stands for spectacle: larger than life stunts, star ensembles, styling and suspension of disbelief. Tying all of this together is a title track that is embedded in our consciousness.
It’s been over a decade since we’ve got a Dhoom film — perhaps casting multi-starrers became harder over the years. Or maybe YRF turned its attention to its home-grown spies — Tiger and Pathaan — instead. But with the desperate need for ambitious commercial entertainers to drag audiences out of their homes and into movie theatres, it feels like the time is ripe for a reboot. And if the gossip threads on Reddit are to be believed, there’s an announcement on the way.
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