Directed and Written by: Vijay Krishna Acharya

Yash Raj Films, 2013

Recommended? Definitely.

I clearly need to be watching more Bollywood films.

A friend of mine sat us all down to watch a three-hour action movie. “You’ll love it,” she said. “It’s about a circus performer who is on a mission of revenge to destroy a bank in Chicago. You don’t have to watch the first two in the series.”

That was enough for me to want to watch it, and I wasn’t disappointed. I thought, for awhile, that the cops were the protagonists — they’re the two characters returning from the last movie. But that was just my western bias — I’m so enculturated into Hollywood storytelling that I just assumed there were clear-cut protagonists and antagonists in this movie.

If you want to see an underdog destroy banks and cop cars, set against fantastic acting and dancing and circus, you should watch Dhoom 3.

Instead, I got to watch a glorious three hours of anti-police car chases, robin hood bank robberies, over-the-top stunts, circus, and Bollywood-style song-and-dance. The non-western plot structure kept me engaged and kept the film unpredictable.

The gender representation wasn’t so hot, I’ll admit, and some of the big reveals were sort of obvious for someone who’s seen the major Hollywood stage magician movies of the past decade or so.

Still, if you want to see an underdog destroy banks and cop cars, set against fantastic acting and dancing and circus, you should watch Dhoom 3.