With Naam Shabana, director Neeraj Pandey choses Shivam Nair
for the spinoff of his previous movie Baby. While Neeraj has written the story,
he hasn’t directed the film.
Earlier, Neeraj Pandey and Akshay Kumar had joined hands together
for a crack spy thriller named Baby, which had made us assured that Hindi Film
Industry has finally arrived when it comes to spy fiction on the silver screen.
The movie was such a big hit that it encouraged the makers
to make a separate movie on one of the characters from Baby named Shabana
(Taapsee Pannu) and thus was Naam Shabana conceived. But, does it match up to
the cleverness of Baby?
The events in this movie occur three years before Baby and
revolves around Shabana Khan (Taapsee Pannu), a girl with a dark past, who is employed
by Ranveer (Manoj Bajpayee), a senior officer of a secret agency, who also
helps her seek vengeance for the murder of her boyfriend. Shabana is trained to
be a killing machine and is soon deployed to abolish Mikhail, a ruthless arms
dealer, who was responsible for killing two Indian agents in Austria. How
Shabana manages to complete her mission with the help of her senior officer Ajay
Singh Rathod (Akshay Kumar), forms the rest of the plot.
After Pink performance, Taapsee is quite good in her action
scenes as well as her intense and dramatic scenes in the film and it is obvious
that the girl has put in her blood, tears and sweat in this role. Bajpayee is fairly
good as the intelligence officer, who recruits Shabana, though his heavy North
Indian accent makes him sound funny when he mouths some dialogues in English.
South star Prithviraj though is completely futile in a badly written role while
Akshay Kumar in his cameo, is naturally worthy to watch. The support cast,
Danny Denzongpa and Anupam Kher are good in their roles.
A movie featuring an ass-kicking female protagonist is bound
to be liked by everybody and Naam Shabana does have its moments, though that
doesn’t mean the many mistakes in the movie are to be overlooked. The first
half indulges the protagonist and her love interest, Jai too much. It is only
post-intermission, particularly the last 35 minutes in which proceedings pick
up. Sticking to a typical-action drama narrative that jumps from Mumbai to Goa,
Vienna to Kuala Lumpur, with the arms dealer and the ISI agents playing a
cat-and-mouse game, the movie, is more a fantasy fare than a realistic one.
Director Neeraj Pandey, who has chosen the pen (credited for
story, dialogues and screenplay) and passed on the megaphone (to director
Shivam Nair) for this one, drafts a commercially feasible project. But Nair's version
dilutes Pandey's thriller elements to some extent as the movie could've done
better if it were a bit more tense and tighter. The movie suffers from is its messy
production values and its ordinary special effects.
Neeraj’s screenplay isn’t as taut as his earlier outings
either. It lacks the depth of A Wednesday, Baby and Special 26. Unlike his earlier
stints, even the most important operations, thrilling escapades and
edge-of-the-seat suspense sequences are foreseeable.
Overall, it is worthy to watch once for able act of Taapsee
Pannu and Akshay Kumar.
