Naqaab benaqaab!

This is not the first time a Hollywood film has inspired a B-Town director to make a blow-by-blow copy of the original.

But what we don't get is, how, after repeated attempts by the media to expose such intellectual theft, filmmakers continue to believe they'll get away by pulling a fast one on Indian audiences.

The latest Hollywood rip-off is Abbas-Mustan's Naqaab (starring Akshaye Khanna, Bobby Deol and debutante Urvashi Sharma), which released last Friday.

The film has been shamelessly lifted from the 2003 film Dot the i, directed by Matthew Parkhill. Even though the Hollywood film is relatively unknown, it received critical acclaim but hasn't been given due credit in its Hindi avatar.

A romantic thriller with an unusual twist in the end, Dot the i didn't go down well with the Western audience thanks to its bait and switch approach (having a faux climax and then revealing the real story). The story is the same for Naqaab too, but critics have also panned it for its confusing and often obtuse sub-plots.

Most of Naqaab's so-called thrilling scenes and even the double climax are a frame-by-frame reproduction of Dot the i. What's more, an erotic love-making scene from the original has also been duplicated (with little effect, we might add) between Akshaye and Urvashi.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time an Abbas-Mastan film has been inspired from a Hollywood film. The duo's earlier work, including Aitraaz, Humraaz and Badshah have scenes directly lifted from Hollywood films like Disclosure, The Perfect Murder and Nick of Time respectively. What's surprising is that while these previous films had at least some level of originality in terms of plot and character development, it seems the filmmakers played the DVD of Dot the i on repeat mode while making Naqaab.