Film Review: RACE 3

160 minutes

Director: Remo D’souza

            ‘Not A Podium Finish’ 

Ten years ago, the immaculately white-suited-booted brothers Abbas and Mastan Burmawalla set the template for action-thrillers with their ‘Race’ (adapted from ‘Goodbye Lover’), followed by a sequel five years later.
Sidelined from the third installment and replaced by choreographer Remo D’souza, the Burmawallas would surely be cringing at how a decade can alter the fortunes of their hugely successful franchise.
Shamsher (Anil Kapoor) heads an extended family of arms-dealers who had to escape India to the thriving deserts of Al-Shifah. His twin children Sanjana (Daisy Shah) and Suraj (Saqib Saleem) — who address each other as ‘bro’ — and step-son Sikandar (Salman Khan) aid, or rather abet, Shamsher in his nefarious designs.
Add Yash (Bobby Deol), pole-dancer Jessica (Jacqueline Fernandez) and antagonist Rana (Freddy Daruwalla) and you have a motley cast of characters, each given an opportunity for a good number of twists and turns in the 160-minute film.
The main action begins post-interval when they attempt to retrieve a harddisc, containing sexcapes of politicians, stored away in a bank vault in Cambodia.
Salman’s role is devoted to dispatching gun-toting thugs to the pearly gates whereas Jacqueline is confined to displaying her pearly whites. Of the rest Anil Kapoor has a decent amount of screentime; and one gets the impression that a chunk of Freddy Daruwalla’s role is edited from the film.
A franchise, which started off as an out-and-out thriller, seems to have disintegrated into the run-of-the-mill action film. Neither of the changes — format (3-D), director or the star appears to have worked in the film’s favour. D’souza seems to have given more importance to the choreography and songs, which act more as speedbreakers and interrupt the flow of the narrative, than to the script.
If your idea of 160 minutes of entertainment is watching Salman discarding his tees or glares in slo-mo, then this is the film for you.