Race 2 to Dhoom 2: Why Bollywood fails to get the sequel formula right

By Gautam Chintamani

Playing the same notes a hundred times over has always been one of Hindi cinema’s favorite pastimes. Who doesn’t love a good story but when it comes to Bollywood it simply yearns to tell the same tale over and over again.

In a business where Sholay easily transforms into a city setting to become Shaan or a Jab Jab Phool Khile’s shikara switches places with an Ambassador taxi to be known as Raja Hindustani sequels have ended up giving Bollywood an official license to behave like a record stuck on constant loop.

Sequels are defined as narrative works that continue the story but for commercial Hindi cinema they have ended up becoming tools that aide in spinning the similar yarn in a same, same but different manner. In India sequels started with the right intention in Harmesh Malhotra’s Nigahen that was the next installment of the man-snake romance of Nagina.

The film was Nagina Part 2 in every possible way as it took the romance of Nagina’s Rajiv (Rishi Kapoor) and Rajni (Sridevi), an ichadhari nagin forward with Neelam (Sridevi), their daughter who returns home after the death of her parents.

Similarly The Return of Jewel Thief tried getting characters from the iconic Jewel Thief and commingled them with a motely crew of new ones thirty years later. Although the film failed miserably at the box-office it did remind us just how wonderful the original was.

It took the concept of sequels almost 17 years before it finally entered Bollywood’s lexicon with Dhoom 2 and it hasn’t looked back since. Dhoom 2 was tailor made for the sequel business as it took next to nothing from the original besides the two leading men.

Dhoom was a surprise hit where the character of the villain ended up looking better than the two heroes and his death at the end left the playing field wide open. It didn’t take long to figure out a winning formula and the sequel weaved the same story all over again around what was the best element from the original.

Dhoom 2 proved to be a much bigger success than Dhoom and made sequels into full-fledged genre. The ease with which Dhoom 2 rode the wave of the original inspired a bevy of successful films to follow suit- Lage Raho Munna Bhai, Phir Hera Pheri, Sarkar Raj, Hathyar: Face to Face With Reality, Bheja Fry 2, Double Dhamaal, Murder 2, Raaz: The Mystery Continues, Jannat 2, Deewane Hue Pagal, Jism 2, Kya Super Kool Hai Hum, Golmaal 2, Krrish, Race 2 to name a few.

The best sequels not only enhance the onward journey of a good story’s characters like Before Sunset but like in the case of The Godfather II go back to a time even before the events of the original film.

Considered by many to be the greatest sequel ever made, The Godfather II might be founded on the original but it continues to stand almost as tall as it’s precursor and a Best Picture Academy Award, the only instance where a sequel winning, is testimony enough.

For Bollywood sequels are nothing more than business ideas fueled by marketing needs and driven by an over zealous publicity machinery. Most of them aren’t even sequels but signs of laziness where the producers leave no stone unturned to cash in on the brand name and therefore most of them resemble insipid products off some assembly line.

The franchise idea of a series like Dhoom or, to some extent, Munna Bhai most of the so-called sequels don’t warrant a continuation. In the Indian context Krrish would be the best example of a sequel where the narrative of the film relied heavily on the events that transpired in the original, Koi Mil Gaya, and in the end the two films seem like one long story. With the third installment releasing later this year one hopes that trilogy would be retired gracefully rather than being made into a series, which from the sound it Krrish 2 threatens to be.

One of the reasons why the sequel, at least in its right sense, might perhaps never work in Hindi cinema is the huge pay-off that accompanies the climax. A majority of popular Hindi films undergo the throes of every conceivable emotion before reaching a resolution and the process rarely leaves anything to be explored further.

Looking at highlights of the plot that Farhan Akhtar created to retell Don in his remake, had he started the film with the image of Don carrying a dead Vijay, the sequel could have really come of age in Bollywood.

Rather than really going all out Akhtar chose to pepper the same narrative with a just a few cosmetic changes barring the two interesting ones in the form of Vijay being killed by Don and changing the shades of the Commissioner’s character, which in any case fell woefully short by the time they played out. 2013 would see almost a dozen sequels being unleashed with one, Aashiqui 2 coming 23 years later and bearing little resemblance with the original, and with one releasing every almost month, the audience would finally know just how bad too much of a good thing could be.