The action in the 1978 Don follows the conventions Hindi commercial cinema had settled into by the mid-seventies: hand-to-hand fights built around exaggerated sound design, stunt doubles used openly, and choreographed brawls that prioritise spectacle over plausibility. Punches land with a crack that bears no relation to a real fist; bodies fly backwards on cue. The staging owes as much to the stunt traditions of earlier Bollywood and to Hong Kong martial-arts imports as it does to any realist ambition. Director Chandra Barot and action director Ravi Khanna worked within a grammar that audiences recognised and enjoyed precisely as a grammar — nobody expected the fights to look real.
The car chases and street pursuits in the 1978 film were shot largely in Bombay, using actual traffic and locations. The budget constraints show in occasional continuity lapses and the modest scale of the set-pieces, but the location work gives the film an unglamorous energy that suits its street-level story. Don's physical presence — the character relies on menace and charisma as much as on fighting skill — means the action is used selectively rather than saturated through the film.
Farhan Akhtar's 2006 remake replaced that grammar with a post-Matrix, post-Bourne aesthetic: faster cuts, handheld cameras, location work across Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur and Germany, and fight choreography designed to look harder and more grounded. The punches are still stylised, but the editing rhythm is compressed and the camera moves with the action rather than observing it from a fixed point. Stunt coordinators brought in for the remake had absorbed the international action-cinema vocabulary that had become standard by the mid-2000s, and the sequences — particularly the highway chase and the climactic boat pursuit — reflect that shift in both production scale and visual approach.
The 2011 continuation, Don 2, pushed further still, staging a major heist sequence in Berlin with a larger budget and more elaborate set construction. The action there is closer to the European heist-thriller tradition than to anything in the 1978 original: precise, architectural, plotted around space and timing rather than bodies in motion.
Across all three films, the fights and chases serve a consistent structural function: they are punctuation rather than argument, arriving at intervals to release narrative pressure rather than to develop character. What changed between 1978 and 2011 was not that function but the production vocabulary used to fulfil it — from Bombay streets and practical stunts to international locations and post-production-heavy sequences that would have been technically impossible in Barot's era.