Bondage gear, multiple camera angles, no story line. Race is multiplex cinema at its worst.

Race has been released. You know this. It is by Abbas Mustan which sounds like a single person but in fact are two brothers with a surname Burmawallah. Race is another film like Cash. Cash is a film like Chocolate. Actually Race is also like Baazigar — popping people off buildings as a mode of exit from this mortal coil — and it is also like Strangers on a Train, but that would be like giving away the suspense.
There have been quite a few Races recently. They have all been about heists or other sundry crimes. They are all about someone trying to screw someone out of something… no, here is the plot.
X has a lot of money. Y wants a lot of money. He asks Z to help him. Z agrees but we know that Z and X are in love.
So Z is only helping Y to screw Z so that she can pull the plug at the last moment.
Ah, no, no, no.
Here’s the thing.
X has no money and Y has been manipulated so that he will commit a robbery of fake diamonds and X will then claim the insurance and run away with the girl in the title song to Brazil.
Or Y and Z fall in love and Z kills them both and kills himself and then tells you the whole story
from his swimming pool in the beginning.
Or Y is a cop and Z cops out until Part II happens.
This is called multiplex cinema.
What is multiplex cinema?
They are supposed to be multiplex films.
Here is how you know that it is a multiplex film:
* There are many starlings and no stars. Or maybe one perhaps — a star like Akshaye Khanna who can never make up his mind whether he should be looking ironically at the goings-on around him or he should be trying for top billing.
* Nobody can act. But this does not matter. Starlings who can act make movies with Rajat Kapoor. Starlings who cannot act make films with Priyadarshan, Abbas-Mustan and Sanjay Gupta.
* Nobody can speak Hindi but this does not matter because the dialogue is mainly in English.
* If Suniel Shetty is involved – as he often is – it will turn out that he can speak neither but that does not matter either. He is now a mnemonic in dark glasses. He is a synecdoche in a trench coat. He is an ambulatory archive of our collective memory of him. He joined the industry as the man on the steroids who had a garment shop. Now he is the man who is no longer on steroids but you remember that he had a good pair on him once.
* If Ajay Devgan is involved, just don’t go.
* They all star Esha Deol or someone who looks like her. If it is not Esha Deol, just don’t go. Esha Deol is the first choice for the girl who fits a body suit very well and does not get the guy. Once they can’t get her, they cast Neha Dhupia.
* If a film has Neha Dhupia, just don’t go.
* The male starling in the film has a nice body or a nice face but almost never both at the same time.
* This is because there is only one man with both and his name is Hrithik Roshan and he won’t act in one of these films because his daddy isn’t making them, nor is Ashutosh Gowariker nor is Yash Chopra.
* No, John Abraham does not have a nice face. He has a craggy face that might be a great face if he did not have the depth of blotting paper. This means he has a great body and a craggy face but he can so not act.
* But then no one acts in these films because you do not need to act. You need to be in the right place in the right time and you need to be able to look
convincing in a body suit.
* When not in body suits, both male and female starlings wear leather and jeans and shamelessly sell their body parts to western designer labels who don’t even pay them for the mileage.
* But most of the time they are in bondage gear or body suits.
* The body suit and the plot are lifted from a movie that has arrived on the DVD circuit. The body suit thing comes from Hollywood where it is to be seen in the kind of film you forget almost as soon as you come out of the theatre. Like that one in which Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones steal something and he turns up on the opposite platform in a train station, just like our Do Anjaane. The best films to steal from are Tarantino films. He does not even mind too much.
* The plot is then Indianised. This means a few songs are added. This is easy butter jelly jam. Since you are doing a crime film, you have to go into the haunts and hideouts of criminals. These shady types, they’re always hanging around dancing women or vice versa. Bring on the pasties and those odd young men with well-developed chests and odd pouts.
* Then many of the characters are given back stories. So it isn’t just that P wants money but he wants it because his mother is sick in hospital and if she doesn’t get the money, her kidney transplant will fail. Remember Arshad Warsi’s sudden segue from comic to curious in Sunday?
* Then the films are shot on location in foreign countries and have at least one chase sequence that has water spraying, guns blasting, white people shouting obscenities and brown people eluding them with skill and dexterity.
* They are all shot with multiple cameras offering multiple angles and every trick that has been tried in Hollywood and in any other film industry in any other country.
* They are all edited zippily but without too many non-linear narrative tricks being tried.
* These films often open with a song in which all the major characters show up, waving their arms and behaving like rappers or hip-hoppers or grasshoppers. (This, in case no one has noticed it, is rather strange. Imagine what would happen if Americans of African Origin suddenly started to sing their songs and dance like the Kolis or the Gonds.)
* If they do not start with a song, they start with a voiceover telling you who the people are and where they’re coming from and what they want to do.
* What do you want to do? I want to race out of a theatre and go home. There I will watch Daku Ramkali or Alibaba Sindbad Alladin.

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