Same Premise, Different Machine
The 2006 Don is a remake of the 1978 film produced and directed by Farhan Akhtar under Excel Entertainment. It keeps the central mechanism intact: a street performer named Vijay is recruited by police to impersonate Don, a crime lord who appears to die during a chase, so that the authorities can infiltrate and dismantle his criminal network. Character names survive, the MacGuffin of a ledger survives, and several major plot beats survive. What changes is register, geography, and — most consequentially — the ending.
Where the original operated within the masala tradition, blending action, comedy, pathos and song into a broad, crowd-pleasing form, the 2006 version tilts toward a sleeker thriller register. Akhtar shot extensively in Malaysia, giving the film a glossy, international surface that the 1978 Mumbai-and-studio version never attempted. The production design favours modernist interiors, steel and glass, read as signs of criminal wealth rather than Bollywood exoticism. The pacing is tighter; the comedy relief that characters like Jasjit and Mac provided in the original is retuned rather than removed.
Shah Rukh Khan plays both Don and Vijay, a double role that the 1978 film gave to Amitabh Bachchan. The casting comparison was inevitable and openly courted by the marketing. Khan's two characters are differentiated by posture and cadence as much as costume — Don carries a coiled stillness; Vijay is loose and reactive. Supporting roles went to Priyanka Chopra as Roma, Omi Vaidya, Boman Irani as DSP DeSilva, and Arjun Rampal as Vardhaan. Om Puri takes the role of the senior police officer Malik.
Songs and Score
The music was composed by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, with lyrics by Javed Akhtar. The title number is reworked from the original's melody — same hook, rebuilt arrangement, updated production — a deliberate act of continuity that signals to audiences familiar with the 1978 version that they are on known ground before anything diverges. The songs are staged as picturised sequences rather than conventional performance numbers; choreography is used to move the camera through space and establish Don's world as much as to display dancing. The item number "Aaj Ki Raat" functions as a set piece that places Roma inside the criminal milieu before her allegiances are clarified.
The Ending That Changed Everything
The original Don resolves with dramatic irony that flatters the audience: Vijay has been running as Don all along, and the police close in believing they have caught a criminal when in fact they have their own operative. The impostor is vindicated, the deception collapses in the right direction, and the state — represented by the honest officer — ultimately wins.
The 2006 remake inverts that resolution entirely. In Akhtar's version, it is revealed that Don himself was never killed and never replaced. The man the audience has spent the film watching as the hapless impostor Vijay was, in fact, Don throughout — the recruitment of the lookalike, the entire police operation, the bumbling impersonation, the apparent vulnerability — all of it a performance Don engineered to destroy his rivals from the inside and eliminate the people who could identify him. DeSilva and the police have been instruments of Don's own plan.
This reversal retroactively reframes every scene. Moments that read as Vijay struggling to maintain a dangerous cover read, on a second viewing, as Don enjoying himself. The ending does not vindicate the state; it humiliates it. That shift in moral position — from a film where the system eventually works to one where the criminal outsmarts the system completely — is the remake's sharpest departure from its source, and the foundation on which the 2011 continuation was built.