Agent Vinod: Saif but sorry

It goes all out to show up how little you know your World Atlas. Whether it succeeds in that mission may vary from viewer to viewer but one thing that the overlong and bloated Agent Vinod definitely does is push you to the very edge of your patience.

 

The film’s manic pace works against it, making comprehension and retention of the rapid fire twists and turns a tad difficult. A new character walks into the frame virtually every five minutes, leading to an overload of sketchy narrative detailing.It is quite another matter that most of these shadowy figures are unceremoniously bumped off by flying bullets before you can say Agent Vinod.

 

It might not be a bad thing at all if a spy thriller manages to stay a step ahead of the audience all the way through its running time. In the case of Agent Vinod, however, the superficial smartness assumes the proportions of an intractable problem. The film’s self-conscious cool quotient whips up no fizz at all.

 

This spy thriller goes places, in fact it goes where mainstream Hindi cinema has never gone before – Dasht-e-Margoh, Afghanistan; Borodino, Moscow; Tangier, Morocco; Riga, Latvia; St Petersburg, Russia; Chaman, Balochistan, and even Somalia. If only the film had something new to offer by way of plot and execution all the miles that the cast and crew clocked would have been worth it.

 

Agent Vinod is well shot and packaged. It has loads of visual style. And lead actor Saif Ali Khan makes a suave new secret agent. But this film is no James Bond humdinger although in terms of many of its key elements it is an unabashed throwback to the early films featuring the world’s most famous fictional secret agent.

 

The protagonist is cool, calculating and unconventional. The film isn’t. The protean RAW agent changes his name and identity like he changes his shirt, but the film does not throw up any surprises.

 

Agent Vinod opens in Afghanistan, where the hero escapes from an enemy military camp with the help of a RAW accomplice, Rajan Sinha (Ravi Kishen). That getaway from the jaws of death is followed by a series of killings in different parts of the world. Among the casualties is the aforementioned secret service ally of the hero.

 

Agent Vinod is dispatched by his boss in Delhi to get to the bottom of the truth about the death of the RAW agent.

 

The plot is littered with international spies, arms dealers, drug lords and a femme fatale, Dr Ruby Mendes (Kareena Kapoor), who is the “personal doctor” of a Moroccan Mafioso, David Kazan (Prem Chopra), and a wealthy London tycoon Jagdishwar (Dhritiman Chatterjee).

 

Also in the boiling pot is a mysterious Colonel (Adil Hussain) who is bent upon laying his hands on a nuclear bomb and a priceless copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is actually a detonator.

 

The trigger-happy bunch gun for each other across the globe – it is one hell of a wild goose chase all for the cause of saving Delhi – and the world – from a nuclear strike by terrorists owing allegiance to handlers across the border. Raw, ISI, KGB, Interpol, sundry national police forces – they all jump into the game as it gets increasingly convoluted.

 

Had this been a Mel Brooks spoof, it might have just worked. Since the tone is deadly earnest – a spy thriller without a touch of humour and an array of James Bond-like gadgets tends to turn leaden all too quickly – Agent Vinod fails to find its mark.

 

By far the most interesting aspect of Agent Vinod is its music, both the set-pieces (including a mujra designed as an item number performed in a Karachi hotel and a desi jig in a Russian nightclub) and the background score.Like writer-director Sriram Raghavan’s previous thriller, Johnny Gaddar, which was a far quirkier and more independent-spirited effort, Agent Vinod falls back on a mélange of sounds drawn from earlier decades of Hindi cinema.

 

But because this is an international spy thriller, the range of musical inspiration is far wider – from Ennio Morricone to Rahul Dev Burman, from Boney M to Khayyam, yes Khayyam indeed. It cannot but be a surprise to hear Aasmaan pe hai Khuda aur zameen pe hum in an action flick that hurtles through its paces without ever pausing for breath. If it did, Agent Vinod might have turned out quite different.