Race 2

Abbas-Mustan always believes in dashing looks, tough fights, engaging storytelling and nail biting climaxes. Well, it worked really well in Race I collecting 85.5 crores worldwide; unfortunately in Race II, although the casts are super cool and fight scenes are quite impressive but the movie lacks immensely on that engaging-story-part.! The movie starts with a bang and takes convoluted route with lots of twists and turns but a bit too slowly because of frequent and unnecessary songs; then in the middle the script looses its element of surprise and you get 'remake' scenes from Zorro I (sword fight where Saif magically redid the epic scene by Antonio Banderas but with 'blunted' swords!) and instead of a sequel you get an ill-advised rehash. The good 'bad-guy' Ranvir/Saif steals the 'highly protected' Shroud Of Turin with just a simple password-forgery and then escapes through the under ground drainage system (which was totally unprotected except an iron-lid); question is, why couldn't he use the same vent to enter the chamber in the first place?!! Can't blame the casts, everyone of them tried hard to live upto their expectations except Amisha Patel playing the role of Anil's extraordinaryly dumb, sex-starved secretary with her poor dressing sense and heavily innuendo-laden dialogues like "When will you pop my cherry?" In short, Race II is a wreck of a movie with pointless screenplay. Only thing racy about the movie is the sizzling Deepika Padukone.

5 years ago , Abbas-Mustan directed Race set a new level in the thriller genre as far as bollywood is concerned....RACE-2 is no different...

As a sequel to RACE i expected this movie to be highly suspenseful, twistful and action packed....which it indeed was.....but what it failed to do was distinguish itself from its prequel...the same kind of storyline, same twists, same type of characters and same scenes were cloned throughout the entire movie... the climax scene was very poorly and sadly executed....

If u've watched RACE, you can easily predict certain part of the sequences and it makes you feel no different....But unlike RACE, apart from only planning and plotting, some action sequences have also been included and to my surprise, they have been executed to perfection....Along with action, cinematography and background score have been the most unique features of RACE-2...

As far as the cast is concerned,there are average performances by JOHN, DEEPIKA and others, but its SAIF who steals all the way...JOHN would have done a far better in a negative role...but fails to impress much...

Finally RACE-2 has all the contents to make it a good thriller film with unexpected twists, but it would have been much much better if the script would have different from its prequel....

"Race" was truly an classy thriller loaded with serpentine twists. A benchmark so high that warranted the makers to surpass if not match. Sadly the franchise clearly is out for the money that can be milked and therefore loses its steam.

For starters instead of taking the linear continuation, the franchise should have been independent in its own right. Too many references to "Race" spoil the proceedings.

Anil Kapoor sadly resorted to gawdy adult jokes. Ameesha Patel, the bimbo secretary was a stocking filler for Sameera Reddy which I am sure nobody cared. Saif reprised his role and look from the first one. Bipasha has a two-minute cameo. Jacqueline & Deepika attempted to fill the void of Katrina and failed miserably. On that note, Jacqueline has the looks and the style to carry it off - sadly lacks in acting department. John Abraham seems to reprising his role from "Dhoom" only this time around steals bits and pieces from "Force" to showcase his chiseled body in the match sequences. Aditya Pancholi is passable.

Pritam has done full justice to the music and is in line with the first "Race". And thats the only saving grace about this sequel.

The directing duo of Abbas-Mastan created Race back in 2008 that deals with the twists, turns, and double/triple crossings between two brothers Ranvir (Saif Ali Khan) and Rajiv (Akshaye Khanna), against an ostentatious backdrop that included the requisite flaunting of material wealth, horse racing, romance, and shady characters that included the likes of femme fatales in Bipasha Bashu and Katrina Kaif in one of her earlier Bollywood roles. The sequel boasts no less, although with only Saif Ali Khan and Anil Kapoor as the now ex police inspector Robert D'Costa returning, but adopting a similar formula that focused on the con.

You don't really need to watch the first film because everything pretty much moved along in standalone fashion in this follow up, which spent a considerable part of the first half hour cementing the nastiness of brother-sister team Armaan (John Abraham) and Elena (Deepika Padukone). One's a street fighter who has never lost a fight, and brought out of the scene by Elena, the brains of their enduring and successful partnership, dabbling into various cons from casino tables, to just about owning an empire both in the light, and in the shady underworld. They form a formidable team, and individually, Shiraz Ahmed's story shows just how bad ass each can be, never batting an eyelid if they have to rely on good old fashioned murder or seduction to get at what they want.

We're soon introduced to another new character played by Jacqueline Fernandez as Omisha, a thief who soon hooks up with Armaan not only because of his good looks but more importantly, his wealth and wicked demeanor, while Ranvir enters the picture to try and gain trust from the ruthless siblings to take on a larger con together, with Elena sending out her foxy signals right from the start. For a Bollywood movie, this covers the romance angle where the leads have their counterparts to woo, or in this case accelerated into the expected song and dance sequence in lieu of something more kinky that can't be shown on screen.

But really, things just aren't that simple, where soon Ranvir gets involved with both women, though for different reasons, and has an objective and motivation that ties in with a key character from the past, as well as to answer the rather open ended prologue in this film. To say a lot more is to ruin the surprises that Abbas-Mastan have in store for audiences. This is a Race movie that has qualities to be expanded into yet another Bollywood franchise of rotating villains played by a top star for each installment, going along the Dhoom route. So expect that things will never be as they seem, and there's almost always a motive behind what someone will say and do, where loyalties can shift at will, and one-upmanship is the order of the game.

Which happens to be the film's weakness as well. Sometimes the flip-flopping extracts a chunk of imagination, coincidence and stretches one's belief that the con actually began many steps beforehand, like a chess grandmaster playing against an amateur, that surprises spring out from the blue, with constant smirking that one got on top of the other, only for that smirk to be wiped out by an even larger wink. It can get tongue-in-cheek at times, and opened up loopholes that would be best glossed over for the entire narrative to work. Heavy reliance on sleight of hand techniques also called for plot convenience, with its fragmented narrative style forced to hide, and then present details of the con.

Heavy reliance on CG is also telling, but here the CG still seemed rather cartoony, which suited the hyper-reality style of the world that the characters in Race exists in. It's entertainment for the masses, so Abbas-Mastan waste no time in plying implausible stunts in every death-defying escape, although a parkour sequence was expertly handled. Set action pieces get bigger as the film moved along, culminating in a really nutty climatic showdown thousands of feet in the air. It's one thing presenting large set action pieces, but another in presenting them well no matter how cheesy it would be. Someone forgot to tell the filmmakers to ease up on the cheesiness, but perhaps they had comedy in mind as well, with a key unintentional one given gossip rags on the John Abraham-Bipasha Basu relationship that will have audiences in stitches.

John Abraham's hulking frame got put to good use, and in what would be the usual Salman- Khan style, there's built-in opportunity here for clothes to be shed in a stylized MMA caged fight, for some brawn to be added rather than to put him in a role whose character is only interested in whatever it takes to make money, and horde cash, in what would be a major negative role since his turn in the first Dhoom. Saif Ali Khan continues with the swagger and poser requirements as Ranvir from the first film, playing the ultimate conman now with a more personal vendetta at hand, and paired up yet again with Deepika Padukone for the umpteenth time. If anything, Deepika's role as Elena fit into the typical Bond girl role, in having little to do, little to add to the story, but there for the eye candy. And she carried off the lightweight role really well, as does Jacqueline Fernandez in yet another sequel of her career. Anil Kapoor is grossly underused here, if only to serve as the plot's conduit between characters, and spending most of his time with his character's secretary Cherry (Ameesha Patel), leering and spouting sexual innuendos.

If movies with twists and turns at every other instant is your cup of tea, then Race 2 would be that popcorn entertainer you're looking for, with a good looking cast providing eye candy to wild away those two and a half hours. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and neither should you.

There is no imagination, or rather stupid imagination all through the movie. The amount of money thrown around is obscene...for the first time a bollywood movie talks in billions of Euros. The special effects are childish, the premise and the so called twists are crazy. Its all about being glamorous, the script proves that no brains have been applied. I cant think of enough bad adjectives for this movie. I couldn't avoid watching it, but do yourselves a favor and stay away from it. I was feeling embarrassed watching it, the makers should have been ashamed.

Lets take one example of the multitude in this movie. a car is fitted with a bomb that would burst if the speed is reduced. So Saif removes it while the car is doing 100+, but lo and behold, the bomb has no wiring connected to anything in the car. its just stuck there, he pulls it and throws it away. So how would it have tripped if the speed was reduced? Just one of the hundreds of examples of asinine non logics in this movie. Stay AWAY!!