Release date (India):
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January 23, 2015
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Director:
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Neeraj Pandey
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Cast:
Language:
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Akshay Kumar, Mikaal Zulfiqar, Taapsee Pannu,
Rana Daggubati, Madhurima Tuli, Kay Kay Menon, Danny Denzongpa, Sushant
Singh, Anupam Kher
Hindi
|
Baby is not half as clever as it clearly thinks it is. Nor
one-tenth as cool. Not thrilling or funny either. What it is is lazily
constructed, loophole ridden, long, lame and boring.
Director Neeraj Pandey’s
penchant for playing to the gallery in a most dangerous fashion was evident
from his debut film A Wednesday. In that
2008 thriller, a fellow known simply as “Common Man” (Naseeruddin Shah) is so frustrated
with the Indian justice system that he blasts off terrorists as a solo operator,
mirroring the kind of town-square justice that America meted out to Saddam
Hussein and bloodthirsty mobs on the social media are increasingly demanding in
India. Why concern yourself with legitimate trials, when an avenging hero could
draw applause? Why bother with moderates when extremism is more likely to succeed
at the box-office?
Pandey’s next film, Special 26, was superior because it struck a tricky balance, telling an entertaining
story of con men without deifying them. A Wednesday’s anarchist ideology
notwithstanding, it too was enjoyable since it served up genuine thrills. Baby, in contrast, is filled with glaring
flaws. For instance, globally wanted terrorists in the film stay in
a tourist resort in Saudia Arabia without a single bodyguard in their suite. Between
the perimeter and the rooms, no safeguards are in place. When an Indian tech ‘expert’
(Anupam Kher) disables the electric fencing by hacking the hotel security system
online, in subsequent dialogues he sounds surprised that a resort staffer manually
restored the bijli. He hadn’t planned
for that?! Yes, Baby is THAT silly.
So if patriotic
chest-thumping was the goal, it must be pointed out that the film makes
Indian spies look like asses. To be fair, the terrorists are asses too. One escapes
from a building in Turkey while Akshay Kumar's Ajay spends some minutes inside, taking instructions
on the phone from his boss in India. Yet, when Ajay emerges from those four
walls, the bad guy is still in sight on a crowded street. It’s as if he was
waiting around for the hero to finish his work.
For the record, Baby is thus named after a top-secret Indian espionage/counter-terrorism agency launched post-26/11. Why Baby?
Because it was meant to be temporary. Feroze (Danny Denzongpa) is the head of
the team, Ajay is a senior member.
Calling Baby simplistic is an under-statement. A
pity, since it drowns lovely actors like Sushant Singh and Kay Kay Menon in a
sea of stupidity. Too much in the film is unexplained. Why, for instance, does a
reputed Saudi policeman do what he does in the end? Is it because the filmmaker
fancied an Argo-like airport climax
but couldn’t figure out how to pull it off with logic?
In the midst of all
this, Akshay plays Ajay with utter conviction. Danny is likeable as his fatherly
boss and it’s hard not to notice the cute-looking English-Pakistani model-actor
Mikaal Zulfiqar playing Team Baby’s “asset” in
Saudi Arabia. All three are helpless though in the face of the film’s
persistent superficiality. The one bright spot in the proceedings is actress
Taapsee Pannu’s very credible turn as an undercover agent who single-handedly
wallops a villain in Nepal. Bollywood would be foolish not to cast Pannu in bigger
roles in more action films in future.
Neeraj Pandey’s Baby is designed for a world where the
word “terrorist” is used only to describe Muslims who kill innocents, and where
the same label is never applied to the pepetrators of well-planned riots like
Delhi 1984 or Gujarat 2002. So careful is this film to please the present
ruling dispensation and its majoritarian supporters, that it describes the 2002
anti-Muslim riots of Gujarat as “Hindu-Muslim riots”. The film is also aimed at
those segments of the population who are getting increasingly vocal about their
antipathy to legal trials, courts, human rights, etc. These are the kind of
people who will casually use words like “collateral damage” to brush aside
innocent victims of anti-terror ops, not admitting to their quiet conviction
that they will never personally be affected or their confident assumption that
those victims will always be ‘the other’.
In some places, Baby also seems convinced that it’s
funny. And so, in one scene, Ajay strikes an enemy agent after he has got the information he needed from the fellow. “Why
did you hit me now?” the chap cries. “Out of habit,” Ajay replies unsmilingly. Oooh,
so cool and so funny, na?
The scene that
exemplifies Baby’s attitude though
features Feroze, Ajay and a bumbling secretary to a Union Minister. When the babu trivialises the sacrifices of
Indian spies, Ajay wordlessly walks to the door, latches it, walks back to the
secretary, slaps him, walks back to the door and unlatches it, all while his
boss looks on. Again, so funny and cool, no? I mean, Ajay is a deshbhakt so it’s okay, no? How dare we
question the actions of a nationalist?
You may well ask why
this is a big deal since Akshay and Salman have repeatedly played the vigilante
in action comedies. The difference between most of those other films and Baby is that those films don’t position
themselves as serious fare. Baby demands
to be taken seriously.
As for the poor writing
and laughable loopholes... well hey, why bother with a strong plot when you could
earn cheap popularity with less effort, when populism could translate into a
forgiving audience? Baby is an
amateurish film.
Rating (out of five): *
PS: Baby’s subtitling
is inexplicable. Expletives are replaced with random words – for instance,
“fuck man” becomes “oh no” rather than asterisks. At one point we are shown DLF
Promenade mall in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj but the subtitles identify it as a “Saket
mall”. No idea why.
CBFC Rating (India):
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U/A
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Running time:
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160 minutes
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