Dhoom: 3 (2013) has everything you would expect from an entry in the Dhoom franchise: motorcycles, increasingly improbable stunts, terrible police work, male bonding, and an antihero who completely overshadows the series leads. It also has a tremendous sense of style and some remarkable performances in this silly, silly movie.
The film opens in 1990 Chicago. Iqbal Khan (Jackie Shroff) and his son Sahir (Siddharth Nigam) have one chance to impress banker Warren Anderson (Andrew Bicknell) and convince the Western bank of Chicago not to foreclose on their fledgling "Great Indian Circus." It is a remarkable performance, skilled stage magic mixed with Cirque du Soliel style acrobatics, but Anderson is not impressed, because it's not dumb enough. He explains that circuses are stupid, and people only want to see stupid things. This is Sahir's villain origin story, so there's really only one way it can end. Iqbal takes his own life, and Sahir is left (almost) alone and very, very angry.
Years pass. Sahir (now played by Aamir Khan) is about to reopen the Great Indian Circus, but he has other interests; he's been pulling off spectacular bank jobs, breaking into branches of the Western Bank of Chicago, throwing the money at the crowd, and then escaping through a combination of parkour and genuinely ridiculous motorcycle stunts. That may be why the Western Bank of Chicago and/or the Chicago PD decide to call in Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), India's leading motorcycle detective.
Jai naturally brings along his sidekick Ali (Uday Chopra), motorcycle mechanic turned annoying police officer. They are met at the airport by Chicago PD's Victoria Williams (Tabrett Bethel) and because she is blonde and attractive Uday immediately starts objectifying her despite Jai urging him to act like a professional.
Sahir has been searching for the perfect leading lady for the circus, and that is why nerdy Aaliya (Katrina Kaif) barges in and demands a chance to audition. Sahir offers her five minutes, and warns that if he looks away for a second it's over. She delivers a performance straight out of All That Jazz, with added acrobatics. Naturally, she gets the job.
Jai sets a trap for Sahir, appearing on television to dare the mysterious bank robber to rob again. Sahir responds by going to meet Jai as himself, claiming to be a concerned citizen with a circus background who once worked with an embittered clown who knew how to vanish from one location and appear in another. And Jai lets him join in on the planning, even sharing security codes with the civilian he just met. You might think this is part of a cunning plan on Jai's part, but he's just bad at his job.
sahir strikes again, using his inside knowledge, and escapes with an even more ridiculous motorcycle stunt. Jai follows in a helicopter and shoots into traffic, wounding Sahir on the shoulder, then realizes that the civilian he gave the access codes to must be the one who used them. He goes to the circus and confronts Sahir, demanding to see his wounded shoulder. The shoulder is not wounded, Jai is humiliated, and he and Ali are kicked off the case. (Naturally they keep working the case, because they are maverick cops.)
There's a trick. The trick is Sahir's identical and autistic twin brother Samar, who has been kept hidden since before Iqbal died for the sake of the act. Sahir and Samar can perform amazing feats of misdirection since no one knows there are two of them, and that is also really helpful when fleeing the scene of a crime. Samar is onboard with committing crimes to avenge his father, but he is his own person with his own interests. He loves spending Sundays out in the world by himself, and he loves Aaliya, who does not know the secret and has no idea that she's been performing with two different men all this time. Sahir and Samar have a close bond, at least until Jai accidentally discovers that Samar exists and sets out to exploit that.
The action in the Dhoom series escalates from movie to movie, and Dhoom 3 adds gadgets. Samar's and Sahir's motorcycles are tricked out Bond-style, with impractical grapple guns and the ability to convert to jet skis. Like the other Dhoom movies, this is a very male world, and Jai's wife Sweety (played in the earlier movies by Rimi Sen) doesn't even get mentioned. Jai's important relationships are all with men; he's exasperated with Ali, feels betrayed by Sahir, and betrays Samar in turn. (He does feel terrible about it.) Ali is a bit creepy around Victoria, but it doesn't go anywhere. There is some genuine feeling behind Samar's relationship with Aaliya, though.
Dhoom 3 does have two advantages over the previous film, though. The first is Aamir Khan, Bollywood's "Mr. Perfectionist," who is incapable of phoning in a performance, no matter how ridiculous the movie is. He acts the hell out of both his characters, and it lifts the film.
The second advantage comes from a simple syllogism. The movie is set in Chicago. Bob Fosse co-wrote and choreographed the musical Chicago. Therefore Dhoom 3 should channel Fosse whenever possible. Aaliya's sizzling audition scene and the movie's opening tap number are clearly Fosse inspired, but there are touches of Fosse sprinkled throughout all the dances, and Sahir spends most of the movie wearing a bowler hat. It's not the most Fosse thing I've seen come out of Bollywod (that would be the song "Jab Bhi Ciggaret" from the movie No Smoking,) but it does give the movie a strong and distinctive style that the other Dhooms lack.
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