Agent Vinod Latest Review

[bollywood]

Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Ram Kapoor, Gulshan Grover

Directer : Sriram Raghavan

The best way to diffuse a bum is through butt crunches. Unless one is referring to the Hinglisized word for a bomb. And the much-awaited dhamaka that this thriller hoped to detonate at the box office might just be diffused once you read this review. Despite miraculous leaps in production values, spy thrillers in Bollywood end up looking like Chinese equivalents of western products. And here, the characters are even stereotyped to the extent of detectives wearing trench coats and moles being obvious, shifty-eyed and literally uncomfortable in their own skin. So let’s just say foreign locales, weapons to annihilate the world, designer suits and not-so-excruciating interrogations don’t cumulatively justify ‘Agent Vinod’ as a thrilling movie-watching experience.

RAW agent Vinod (Saif Ali Khan) divides his screen time between being questioned (when he is captured) and playing real-life Counter Strike when he’s trying to escape from the baddies. Now when you’re a spy in a movie, you need to be indestructible, trained to do just about anything and hop across continents like they were puddles on the ground after a drizzle. So Vinod does all this without a scratch – until he’s commissioned a case that allows enough air miles to win a free ride to Pluto. So he jets to Russia, Latvia, Morocco, Pakistan and a dozen other countries to solve the mystery of this curious super weapon referred to as “242” and nothing else.

While these three numbers don’t seem world-threatening and knee-trembling, we soon learn that they refer to a nuclear bomb, no less. And it is indeed a unique product: it looks like a mosambi juice-maker and the detonator fits snugly into a poetry book. And the very minute this magical device is handed over to the controller, a few words of caution are offered, “Yeh nuclear bomb ka detonator hain, don’t lose it.” Now that’s something that should be included in the manual as well just to be doubly sure.

In his quest to discover and diffuse “242”, Vinod meets Irum Bilal (Kareena Kapoor), an agent just like him (only with far fewer facial expressions) from our neighbouring wonder, Pakistan. Irum and Vinod are obviously headed for a common goal and are subjected to endure the same misadventures: surviving bombs, Prem Chopra (as a Moroccan gang-lord perpetually dressed in a maxi), double agents, triple agents but thankfully no LIC agents. During this, the two try very hard to evoke feelings for each other but if they do, they really don’t make it apparent to the audience. So if there was to be love story hidden cleverly somewhere within the indiscriminate firing, we really need a spy to crack it.

Vinod and Irum have to be the most tormented secret agents ever. While severe interrogations and dodging a million bullets can be exhausting, what seems to hurt them the most is assuming any recognizable facial expression. Perhaps special agents are trained to be poker faced. Perhaps Saif was too cautious of not letting out his potato-chips-endorsing self. We will never know.