It's a guy thing.

I have to respect a movie that knows what it wants to do, and then does it. Dhoom (2004), for instance, sets out to be a big dumb action movie, and it succeeds admirably on all counts. It’s big, it’s an action movie, and it’s dumb.

A new gang of motorcycle riding super-thieves are operating in Mumbai, and so far the police are powerless to stop them. ACP Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), the rising star of the police department, believes that to catch these thieves, they’ll need someone who thinks like a thief, and he knows just where to turn. His wife Sweety (Rimi Sen), a veterinarian with a fondness for strays, has befriended hapless, slightly shady, but charming mechanic and motorcycle racer Ali (Uday Chopra), and Jai blackmails Ali into working for the police.

Ali provides a completely different perspective on the case, and thanks to his street smarts and contacts in the motorcycle racing world, Jai and the police are able to get close tot he thieves and . . . No, wait. That would make sense. Jai brings Ali into the investigation, and then spends the rest of the movie not listening to him. Ali is there for comic relief, and to give Jai a buddy to bond with, and any actual police work on his part is apparently purely coincidental.

The gang of thieves are, in fact, a group of pizza deliverymen led by Kabir (John Abraham). Kabir runs a tight ship, and he’s so insistent on keeping a low profile that when one of the gang buys a fancy sports car, he drives it off a cliff, just to make a point.

Despite this, Kabir calls Jai and offers him the time and location of the next heist, daring the police to stop it. Jai and his men try, but fail, in part because Ali chooses to save the woman singing on the burning stage (Esha Deol) rather than try and catch the fleeing motorcyclists. After a very public fight, Jai resigns in disgrace, while Ali returns to the motorcycle racing circuit . . . where he’s recruited by Kabir to be the new member of the gang.

Dhoom is set in a hypermasculine world. Sweety is probably the most important woman around, but after her initial scantily clad dance number, she fades into the background, appearing every now and then to cook food, fawn over small dogs and nag her husband. Instead, the movie remains focused on the relationships between men, as they zoom around on motorcycles and shoot guns at one another. It’s male bonding writ large, as Jai and Ali learn to work as a unit, while Kabir tries to woo them both.

And then there’s the plot. Long time readers of the Gorilla’s Lament will know that I’m very forgiving of big dumb action movies, as long as the action is good. I would be happy to extend the same forgiveness to Dhoom, if Jai and Kabir didn’t spend so much time congratulating one another on being brilliant. They’re not brilliant. They’re idiots, who only manage to succeed through coincidence and poor planning on the part of the equally stupid people around them. I don’t demand brilliant plotting from my cheesy cops and robbers movies, but don’t tell me your plotting is brilliant when it really, really isn’t.

That said, the action scenes were indeed plentiful, improbable, and a great deal of fun. I enjoyed Dhoom, I just don’t think I’ll respect it in the morning.