The Brothers Abbas Mustan are seasoned Bollywood warhorses. They created a successful brand of cinema in the 90s which was uniquely theirs: large sets, song-and-dance which remind you of MTV grind, good-looking men and women kitted out in sexy attire and no morals. They excelled at getting our seedha saadha stars do dodgy things for pyaar, paisa and pelf: an impressive array of A-listers — from Shah Rukh Khan to Akshay Kumar to Salman Khan to Saif Ali Khan — passed through their hands, scoring humungous hits.
The duo has been on the downslope for a while now, the Abbas-Mustan baroque construction of scenes and situations at odds with contemporary styles. Their last outing introduced TV comic Kapil Sharma to the movies via a limp comedy. In this latest one, expressly made to launch Mustafa, son of Abbas, they haven’t taken any chances. They’ve cherry-picked from amongst their own hits to cobble together Machine: the biggest chunks are recognizably from Baazigar, crossed with Soldier, and Race.
You could play a spot-the-movie game through the 148 minutes which pan out in what can be called an Abbas-Mustan template: swanky cars zooming around tracks, rich fathers of good-looking daughters flagging off races, leading men spouting dialogues in pursuit of pretty women, tricky twists, and a plot with enough holes to drive trucks through
