Live and let Don.

I can't really talk about Don 2 (2011) without spoiling the events of Don; even the title is sort of a spoiler.  So let's get the spoilers out of the way now.  In the last movie, Don (Shah Rukh Khan), the gangster who is too cool to bother with having a name, dies in police custody, but DCP De Silva (Boman Irani) recruits Vijay (also Khan), a kindly and sort of goofy street performer, to infiltrate Don's gang and discover the identity of Don's superiors, especially the mysterious Vardhaan.  When De Silva is killed, Vijay is left without support, and he teams up with fellow revenge-seeker-in-disguise Roma (Priyanka Chopra) to unmask Vardhaan, who was really De Silva all along and is not dead.

But De Silva is not the only character with a secret.  Vijay is really dead, and we've actually been following Don pretending to be Vijay pretending to be Don in order to infiltrate his own gang, which gives him the chance to rule the Tri-State Area!take over the Asian drug trade.  Don stays just long enough to flirttaunt with Roma one last time, and then he makes his escape.

 

Five years (and one movie) later, Don has mostly consolidated his control over the Asian drug trade, and more importantly, he has stopped wearing his ties on the inside of his shirt.  Don wants to move into the European market; the European market does not want Don to move in, so they arrange for an ambush.  Don shoots absolutely everybody and makes his escape again.

Meanwhile, Roma has gone to work for Interpol.  (That's movie Interpol, the one with the armed agents and law enforcement powers, not real Interpol.)  Her superior, Malik (Om Puri, also reprising his role from the first movie) has announced his retirement, and Roma is just trying to talk him out of it when they are interrupted by . . . Don?

Don wants to make a deal.  He offers to give up his entire syndicate and basically every criminal he's ever met, in exchange for every country in the world dropping all charges against him.  It's an intriguing offer, and there's no chance of anyone taking him up on it.  

 

Instead, Don is sent to prison.  The same prison which holds Vardhaan.  And that's just what Don wanted; he's there to break Vardhaan out of prison, because he needs his help to break into the Deutsche Zentral Bank in Berlin, because this was secretly a heist film all along!  Don and Vardhaan, along with Don's girl Friday Ayesha (Lara Dutta) and starstruck but basically good guy hacker Sameer (Kunal Kapoor) plan to steal the printing plates form the bank.  Roma and Malik are in hot pursuit, but she's mainly in Germany to give Don somebody to flirttaunt with. 

Don 2 is a movie that knows exactly what it is.  It's pure style over substance, but we are talking about an awful lot of style here.  There are cool spy gadgets (at one point Don uses a Mission Impossible-style mask to disguise himself as Hrithik Roshan), crazy car chases, visceral fight scenes, and slick song numbers, but the movie's greatest source of style is one Shah Rukh Khan.

 

And this is where Vijay being dead helps the movie, because you don't have the Good Shah Rukh character to root for.  There is only Don.  And Don isn't the villain protagonist because he's a better person than the people he's fighting.  Don is an awful person, but he's the villain protagonist because he's played by Shah Rukh Freaking Khan, making full use of his reserves of preternatural charisma.  He's like James Bond, but evil.  (Well, more evil.)

 

And like Bond, Don is still vulnerable, even without a sympathetic backstory.  At heart Don is an arrested adolescent, an eternal thirteen year old with access to money and guns and fast cars and beautiful women.  And that's why you cast Shah Rukh Khan for this sort of thing; mixing cool and goofy is what Shah Rukh does.  He gives the character of Don an extra dimension.  Granted, that's still only two dimensions, but it's one more dimension than I was expecting.