Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal
Dhan Dhana Dhan …………………. Bore
By Vishal Verma

Rating:

Football can never be so boring, the world’s most exciting and popular sports turns out to be sleepy pointless 2+ hour game by director Vivek Agnihotri and its writers Rohit Malhotra and Vikramaditya Motwane. Normally, we often come across sports flicks churned out every now and then from Bollywood’s mother of inspirations – Hollywood.

These sports flick talk about the triumph of human spirits, believing in your self, victory of the underdogs and blah blah blah.

Now Bollywood is also following the trend and started delivering ‘ Iqbal’s’ and ‘Chak De’s’ in those lines. ‘Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal’ makes an attempt to knock on the doors of this genre. But will fail to get any response.

Following are the reasons in random order….

Before this we had ‘Chak De’ which was remarkable in its approach, it dealt with nationality, state norms, quota systems and the politics of selection board which prevails in India at one go. It worked.

So, does ‘Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal’ which tries to handle a much wider issue – Racism works?

Sadly, it fails miserably. The team in the flick is not at all established. The captain of the team is a midfielder (Arshad Warsi), there’s a forward from Bangladesh(Dibyendu Bhattacharya), a Sardarji(Raj Zutshi), who plays defense, main striker(John Abraham) an Indian and the rest from somewhere in Asia, and they play anywhere. To find a place in heartland of the Gora’s. And save their club. Trained by an Indian coach an ex champion who has a disturbing past (Boman Irani). They all are nursed by a doc (Bipasha Basu).

The problem is, except the main striker - John Abraham, everybody else is offside and miscast.

The director and his writing duo keep on doing fouls after fouls in this game and leave the audience hassled.

This game is played on a sticky ground where you don’t get emotionally attached with the players cause you don’t know who is who & is playing where.

The training sequences are hard to digest. The coach doesn’t look like a coach from any angle. The motivation factor is missing. On what basis do the players have differences with each other? During the league matches much to the audience shock and disbelieve, spectators are missing from the background. Only during the climax, we see spectators around.

John gets signed by a leading football club, the physician ok’s the fitness test and then suddenly during the climax match he refers to his X-ray of his nose and comes to a conclusion that he should not play??.
And from where, and why this Biloo Rani comes…. To further take life out of this flick which is already in ICU?
 
The movie is being well promoted and it has been branded, packaged, campaigned well which has created some buzz. But finally when we open the gift hamper it disappoints and makes you sad.

Vivek Agnihotri's previous flick "Chocolate" had some style but here even that is missing.

Although the movie has an interesting start – a teenager dribbling the ball all over the streets of the town in London while the credit rolls in. But as soon as the ball lands on the foot of the captain of the team, very soon you start realizing that the dream is getting over.

So……

Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal is a disappointment all over the ground.