The original resolution and what it assumed
The 1978 film ends with its moral arithmetic balanced. Vijay, the small-time street performer recruited by the police to impersonate the dead crime boss Don, has been living inside that dangerous masquerade for most of the runtime. When the truth is finally established — that the real Don died early, and the man the underworld and the police have both been dealing with is an impostor — the revelation comes as relief. The audience has known roughly where it stands: Vijay is the innocent man, Don was the criminal, and the plan, however chaotic, served a legitimate end. The impostor survives; the scheme is disclosed; the film closes with the moral categories intact.
That structure depends on the audience's trust in a particular alignment of knowledge. We have been watching Vijay struggle. We understand his predicament. The police know what they are doing, more or less. The ending confirms what we expected to be true.
What the remake does instead
Farhan Akhtar's 2006 version arrives at an apparently similar climax — identities tangled, the crime boss apparently dead or neutralised, the masquerade apparently over — and then adds a scene that retroactively redraws everything that preceded it. It is disclosed that the man identified as the street performer Vijay, the man the police believed they had recruited, was in fact Don all along. Don had survived, taken on the identity of Vijay, and run his own operation under cover of the police's scheme. There was no innocent man navigating a dangerous imposture. The impostor and the criminal were always the same person.
This is not a complication layered onto the original resolution; it is a structural inversion of it. The 1978 film's ending confirmed the audience's understanding of events. The 2006 ending reveals that the audience's understanding was itself the film's longest con.
What it does retrospectively
The reversal changes the weight of every previous scene. Moments that read as vulnerability — Don-as-Vijay struggling to hold the performance together — become instead controlled manipulation. Scenes in which characters extended sympathy or protection to the apparent innocent acquire a different charge: they were deceived, and so, the film insists, were we. The police plan, which in the original functioned as a legitimate if flawed mechanism of law enforcement, is here revealed as something that was captured and turned from the inside before it had a chance to operate.
This is a different moral register altogether. The 1978 film is ultimately about an ordinary man forced into extraordinary danger and surviving it; the 2006 film is, in retrospect, about a criminal of exceptional intelligence outmanoeuvring every institution around him. The audience's sympathy, built carefully across the full runtime, is shown to have been misplaced — which is the point. The film doesn't ask you to reject that sympathy, but it does ask you to notice that it was engineered.
The consequence for the continuation
The ending also functions as a structural commitment. Because it establishes Don as a figure of total, patient cunning rather than mere ferocity, the 2011 continuation has a specific kind of antagonist to build from — one whose power is cognitive rather than simply violent, and whose defining characteristic is the ability to make everyone, including the viewer, believe they understand the situation when they do not. The sequel inherits that promise and is obliged to honour it.
What Akhtar's version ultimately preserves from the original is not the resolution but the architecture: the lookalike plot, the double identity, the slow disclosure. What it discards is the original's moral legibility. The 1978 ending asks you to feel relief. The 2006 ending asks you to feel, belatedly, that you were played — and to find that entertaining rather than insulting. Whether a viewer does depends entirely on whether they consider the withholding fair. That question is, by design, left open.