Don won't add any feather to Farhan's cap

When you think of Don, and all of us have been doing so ever since Farhan Akhtar announced he was remaking the 1978 film, you think of a classy, wily, rogue, very very charming, who could outwit the Interpol and police of eleven nations.

What do you get when you see Farhan's version? Exactly the same, except he now operates from Malaysia and with time, his gizmo quotient has gone up. The classy bad man is still the same bad guy who roams the world at will, dealing in drugs and money, the man without a conscience.

Yes the shot takings are classier, yes the colours used are more attractive but what has essentially happened in this Shah Rukh Khan film is that a few cosmetic changes have been made, and some major jazzing up work has happened.

What one needs to ponder, and this will be more and more obvious as time passes is where has the SRK energy, the magic gone? Why is there no chemistry between him and Isha or Priyanka or for that matter Kareena Kapoor who seduces him with Yeh mera dil? True, he returns to form with Khaike paan banaraswala but that is too little, too late.

Also, there just isn't enough of SRK either as Don or the simple Vijay. Half way through the film Boman Irani, the DCP who isn't, and Arjun Rampal, who has his own long and tedious backstory hijack the film. There isn't any edge-of-the-seat factor at play here, making the thriller just one more story being told. At nearly three hours it's also way too long.

Don will not add any feathers to Farhan's cap no matter how it performs at the box office. Neither will it redeem SRK's career. But hopefully it will give pause to all those film makers out there who are planning remakes and make them think if they really have something more to say than the original did.