Watch TrailerKhufiya Movie Review: Streaming sites are filled with thrillers these days – perhaps in the hope that they would keep viewers glued to the screen and, also, help raise membership numbers. But unfortunately, most of the films are rank bad; a few are good and gripping and the rest somewhere between these two points. Vishal Bharadwaj’s latest adventure, Khufiya, is neither good nor bad. It is just about average, and the director, whose love for the Bard of Avon is well known, is yet to come up with something as exhilarating as Omkara (a takeoff on Othello) in which Saif Ali Khan’s performance was nothing short of brilliant. Bharadwaj’s other forays into Shakespeare territory – Haider (Hamlet) and Maqbool (Macbeth) – were good, though not as great as Omkara. Well, yes, Irrfan Khan’s part in Haider remains unforgettable.
Even in his latest work, Khufiya (based on Amar Bhushan’s Escape To Nowhere), the director has got at least one name from a Shakespeare play, Brutus! The movie has little novelty; it weaves in and around three intelligence agencies in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and is set after the 1999 Kargil war when India was really worried about the elections in Bangladesh and was hoping that a political party that seemed to be like a puppet of the ISI in Pakistan would not clinch power.
Tabu as Krishna Mehra (or KM) leads an espionage operation to prevent Brigadier Mirza (Shataf Figar) from taking control in Dhaka. She puts together a team, and finds that one of her own men, Ravi Mohan (Ali Fazal), is a mole who sells India’s highly classified documents to a foreign power. Ravi is a happily married man with wife Charu (Wamiqa Gabbi) and little son. His mother lives with him, and plays an important role in helping Ravi go about his nefarious activities.
There are elaborate scenes of Tabu (who is divorced from Shashank/Atul Kulkarni and lives with her teenage son though the ex is a friendly guy who is to be seen in her house ever so often) and her team spying on Ravi and Charu.
The climax is complex – unexpected yes, but a tad unbelievable. My question, are traitors pardoned so easily? This is where the writing totters, sometimes glaringly so. Imagine KM and her men trooping in and out of Ravi’s house in broad daylight to plant bugging devices. And nobody notices them in a country where neighbours are such nosey parkers. As Charu returns, KM and her colleagues escape in the nick of time.
As a walked out of the theatre, I could not help wondering what was wrong with Tabu. She appeared morose all the time! She is such a fine actress that I was really disappointed here. But the performer who really stood out was Wamiqa. She was very good as a woman who was clueless in the beginning about her husband’s misdemeanours and later transforms to help KM in faraway South Dakota. An amazing arc that is bound to fetch her greater roles as we go along. Fazal was not bad, really, torn between his love for his family and the dirty work he does for money, showering Charu with expensive jewellery.
I am going with half a point more for the performances.
