And so I couldn’t help but think that it was a stroke of pure genius for Akhtar to make his biggest liability – the fact that this was a remake – work to his advantage. The major part of this movie is engineered in such a way that it is aimed directly at your recollection of the “classic” Don. The most shocking moments of the film depend upon your remembrance of earlier plot details.

And I can’t believe I’m typing this, but – Shah Rukh Khan makes the perfect Don the Younger.

Do you remember a time when SRK wasn’t caught deep in the hugely successful facial-tic school of filmmaking perfected by Karan Johar? I do. I always thought he had more charisma than anything else but there were odd moments when he would actually receive direction rather than adulation from behind the camera and the results were always apparent. Here then is a sign that that SRK hasn’t died a peaceful death under the burden of all those cashmere sweaters and gently weeping mothers, wives, daughters, and other random women.

Amitabh Bachchan as Don the Older was first, last, and always an adult. That menace which managed to be sexy in spite of the fact that it belonged on the face of a vicious killer (“Better luck next time, baby!” Don snaps to a very seductive, post-coital Helen shortly before killing her) and that bucolic buffoonery which characterized Vijay (“Chhora Ganga kinare wala,” he announces while wiggling his butt in front of the camera), were both examples of Men. Please note the capital letter.

Don and Vijay as played by SRK are men who haven’t altogether left their boyhood behind. In an age where “old” is a dirtier word than ever before, when you see Don in his natty clothes with the tie tucked inside his shirt, it makes an altogether different statement from the one made by Bachchan in his floppy bowties. This is a sociopath (or do I mean psychopath?) who likes to watch cartoons round the clock and approaches the world as a kid would a candy store. On the other hand, Bachchan’s Don had had his inner child’s head bashed in a long time ago.

This painstaking touch with subtle details, by the way, is definitely reason enough to love this movie. Note Munch’s "Scream" hanging discreetly on the wall of the old fashioned walk-in safe of Stolen Goods. Nice. And how about the camera’s concentric dissolve in the song with the big, flashing disco ball? Very nice. Akhtar even provides Vijay with his very own plinky-plonky instrument in the Morya Re song with its tongue in cheek reference to Rahul’s banjo or whatever that annoying thing was in DDLJ. I’ll forgive them Isha Koppikar’s unfairly hideous wardrobe for that one.

I suppose on one level it is rather sad that I’m so excited by a movie that can be squarely tagged as nothing more or less than “commercial cinema”. You can read into it a judgment upon the state of writing in Bollywood. However, it is also true that I cannot find it within myself to look down upon films that do not seek to serve any greater purpose than entertainment. I enjoy what is today called “multiplex cinema” [the “parallel cinema” of yesteryears] but that doesn’t mean I’m above the mainstream.