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Release
date:
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May 24, 2019
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Director:
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Raj Kumar Gupta
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Cast:
Language:
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Arjun
Kapoor, Praveen Singh Sisodia, Prasanth Alexander, Bajrang Bali Singh,
Aasif Khan, Devendra Mishra, Jitendra Shastri, Sudev Nair
Hindi
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Do you sometimes
sit in a movie hall and sense that what is unfolding on screen began with an
interesting concept that somehow choked at the execution stage? India’s Most Wanted is that kind of
film.
Indian intelligence
officials and globe-trotting espionage
agents have in recent years become a Bollywood fixation, but
from the Saif Ali Khan-Kareena Kapoor-starrer Agent Vinod in 2012, to Baby (2015) with Akshay Kumar in the lead, and last year’s Aiyaary headlined by Manoj Bajpayee and Sidharth Malhotra, these films
have tended to kick off with a promising premise and then struggle to be
anything much beyond that. India’s Most
Wanted (IMW) goes down the same
path.
Prabhat (Arjun
Kapoor), IMW’s central character, is
a stubborn fellow who has a mind of his own independent of his well-intentioned
immediate superior Ravi Raj (Rajesh Sharma)
and the intelligence agency for which he works. As the film opens, India is
being rocked by bomb blasts engineered by shadowy figures believed to be in
Pakistan and Dubai. A source gives Prabhat a lead about the mastermind behind
these explosions, which indicates that the man is, in fact, in Nepal.
Higher-ups in Delhi are not convinced, but Prabhat decides to head off to Nepal
anyway with a motley crew of colleagues, all of them conducting the
operation at their own expense. Bossman Ravi Raj gives them his
blessings but not his on-the-record assent.
Honest, efficient
government servants defying their senior’s orders in their frustration with sarkari red tape and obduracy, and ending
up in a clash with Pakistan’s ISI in a third country while hot on the heels of
a brutal terrorist, that too purportedly based on a true story – this is the
stuff that dreams
are made of, this is thriller heaven. With such
ingredients at hand, IMW should have
been an exciting suspense saga. Yet from the starting block the film struggles
to get into the groove, despite assembling an interesting cast who look
convincing as real people rather than actors to play Prabhat’s team of
rogue agents.
The fault, dear
Brutus, is not in the stars but in the screenplay. Firstly, it took me a while
– too long a while – to wrap my head around the chain of individuals that had
got information to Prabhat and why. Some amount of confusion, especially
initially, is not unusual in films of this variety, but they usually offer
compensation in the form of an accelerated pace or breathtaking action or, in
the case of directors opting for a quiet tone, an under-stated sense of urgency
that taps the audience’s own instinctive assumptions about the drama and danger
intrinsic to such situations in real life although they are alien to ordinary
folk like us. Not here.
IMW aims at being an intelligence agency procedural
rather than a Mission Impossible / James Bond enterprise, which is fine in
theory since writer-director-producer Raj Kumar Gupta demonstrated his natural
affinity for the genre in the excellent Ajay Devgn-starrer Raid (2018) set in the world of income-tax officials. IMW, however, simply does not lift off.
Even after the
initial cobwebs are cleared, the narrative remains fuzzy. The primary informant’s
motivations are never convincing, Prabhat & Co find their prey with what
seems like considerable ease, the actions of their Nepalese counterparts are
inexplicable, and the ISI comes across as a sluggish lot.
That last point –
the absence of a powerful antagonist – is the final nail in the coffin. Before
it is hammered in, the film has already been betrayed by its own seeming lack
of faith in the tenor it has set for itself. In life-and-death scenarios
towards the end, for instance, precious seconds and minutes are spent just
staring down opponents in conventional Hindi filmi style. And the voiceover by
the lead terrorist at regular intervals is ineffective.
To be fair to IMW, neither the Indian agents nor the
ISI are downright dumbos, unlike the desis
and their enemy targets in Baby.
What IMW does have going for it are Arjun
Kapoor’s earnestness, the credibility of the supporting cast especially
the inimitable Rajesh Sharma, the non-judgmental tone adopted towards Sharma’s Ravi
Raj although he is not willing to stick his neck out as Prabhat
does, the warm equation between him and Prabhat, and the realness of the
settings. Nepal looks gorgeous, but cinematographer Dudley cleverly uses the
visuals not so much to impress us with their prettiness as to conjure up an
ominous atmosphere.
Most important,
although the terrorist being hunted down by Prabhat is a Muslim, his religious
identity is not over-emphasised to crudely cash in on the Islamophobia
prevailing worldwide in the way Bollywood films like Padmaavat and Kesari have
done since 2017-18 – he is what he is, that is a fact, nothing more,
nothing less. His ISI backers too are not stereotypically portrayed as demonic
or fumbling cartoons – they may be sluggish, as mentioned earlier, but they are
not foolish. And thankfully Prabhat’s Muslim colleague is treated as a regular
person, not a contrivance planted in the screenplay to be condescendingly
positioned as redemption for the Muslim community – the fact that he happens to
be Muslim struck me rather late in the film because a big deal is not made of
it. Despite its inevitable allusions to patriotism, inevitable considering the
overall theme, India’s Most Wanted
also does not resort to the kind of loud, chest-thumping nationalism that is
all the rage in Bollywood and the public discourse these days.
At a time when many
Bollywood stalwarts are revealing themselves to be either opportunists or
bigots, Raj Kumar Gupta deserves high praise for this aspect of his writing and
direction, especially since such opportunism has yielded solid box-office
dividends in the past year. Sadly, his decency alone cannot hold up a film.
Barring occasional suspenseful passages, India’s
Most Wanted does not live up to the expectations it raises in its opening
scenes. It lacks the punch, pizzazz and substance to ensure that its Shah Rukh Khan reference hits home.
Well, I guess the
director who has already given us No One Killed Jessica, Raid and the
lesser known but equally commendable Aamir
is allowed an off day. Waiting for your next film, Mr Gupta.
Rating (out
of five stars): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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125 minutes 26 seconds
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy:
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