Over the last few decades, desi productions have come up to speed, matching several aspects of the best foreign action films. The camerawork and sound can be as sophisticated as in any international cine-product, the non-action acting can be good too, and the editing can be world-class lajawaab. But where we shoot ourselves in the foot is in the actual action bits.
You may have never been in the same galaxy as a firefight, but you know that when this fool of an ‘Indian Agent‘ crosses the courtyard in a running crouch, he’s leaving himself open to being nailed by a hail of bullets from the villain’s Uzi. And when that doesn’t happen, you feel the plot-umpires were biased. In a chase sequence, our actors invariably do stupid things, which fail to capture the villain, moving when they should stay still and vice versa, forgetting ever to replace the magazine after having let off 20 shots from a handgun that somehow never malfunctions or runs out of ammo.
Adding to this annoyance are protocol things, which happen around the action. The hero operative or his sidekick will be lax and loose-tongued in basic security matters. The high-risk prisoner-cum-witness will be brought in through the main gate of the airport where anyone could shoot him. The minister of spookery will demand to know things that no minister ever wants to know, and the security agency boss will spill the beans and that too in the hearing of the minister’s dodgy secretary.
If you look at a film like Stefano Sollima and Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, the brilliant action scenes take place on a bedrock of solidly laid out procedure and intra-agency politics. There is resentment, suspicion, and competition among the main characters, affecting the details of the actual, very realistic action.
In comparison, take a film such as Khufiya made by Vishal Bhardwaj. VB is one of our better scriptwriters/directors, so one could be forgiven for expecting something that is a notch above all the run-of-the-mill films and TV series. Alas (spoiler-fest alert), this is also a film you should watch mostly for the laughs.The evil Bangladeshi villain murders the woman trying to poison him, not quietly but in front of a party of wealthy Dhakanese. This woman is recruited by Krishna Mehra (Tabu), the Indian station chief in Dhaka. Ms Mehra and Ms Asset proceed to have a torrid affair, after which comes the young agent’s tragic attempt to kill the bad guy. Later, we follow the fortunes of a mole (Ali Fazal) within the Indian security agency. He’s in the employ of our American friends in the shape of the cheerful CIA station chief. The mole is rumbled by Mehra and colleagues. As he prepares his family to escape, he tells them a car will take them away.
Waiting below is a spanking huge Mercedes. In it is the CIA station chief, rocking her iPhone torch. You haven’t yet finished guffawing when an entire Indian extraction team enters the US to grab the traitor. The Bangladeshi arch-villain comes to have dinner with the mole and the CIA agent running him. The CIA agent’s wife also comes for dinner, and terrible action ensues in which a serving dish full of rogan josh is severely tortured.
At the movie’s end, you wonder why the mole’s evil mother is a better shot than almost everybody else. The cast is full of fine actors, led by Tabu and Ali Fazal, and it’s sad to see them wasted. Mehra has a great line when she sneers at the CIA man: ‘You Americans are intelligent only in your movies.’ Unfortunately, the comeback in the viewer’s mind goes: ‘Wish one could say the same about you Indians and your spy movies.’
