Naam Shabana – Bland

7

The movie traces the journey of the protagonist Shabana (Tapasee Pannu) from an average young girl to becoming an officer in special unit of the armed forces of India.

The unit that works without a name, without a face and without any recognition. Works behind the scenes and always incognito. Shabana is studying in second year of commerce and is learning/ championing Kudo (some martial arts for all of us). Jai is her friend and daily picks and drops Shabana from home to college and of course loves her. Shabana too confesses her love. And in some circumstances Jai is killed and Shabana is helpless. The police does not seem to be doing much and her patience with the system is quickly waning.

One day she receives an anonymous call which promises to help her with all the details of the murder and in return she needs to do a job for the agency. Thus she gets introduced to the agency.

On completing a few tasks, Shabana gets recruited to the agency. She realizes how the agency had been tracking her, the entire life and the reach and power of the agency.   She is further trained and is finally assigned the bigger job of eliminating an arms dealer, Mikhail.

The movie is fast paced but not water tight. Its predictable hence its thrilling but not nail biting. It’s not even close to the other movie in the franchise, Baby. The storyline is a thin and though the writers try to make the character of Shabana complex, they don’t really delve much and indulge too little in her, despite having the opportunity.

Manoj Bajpai as the key guy in the agency, orchestrating all the actions from his office with all the live CCTV and satellite footage and a blue tooth earpiece gets irritating after a while. Wished to see him in some action sequence. But he does it well.

Akshay Kumar in a small role retains his role as the agent and rescues Shabana in some tricky situations. Danny and Anupam Kher too have a very small role to maintain continuity and correlation with the earlier film.  Tapasee Pannu had come riding on the highs of her performance in the movie Pink. But wish she had more expressions in this movie. She emoted so well in Pink. In most of the scenes here she is absolutely expressionless. No smile, no frown, no anger, no cheer just going about the routine with a straight face. But she does the action scenes brilliantly. You just forget it’s a girl doing the action. So done well but a little disappointing compared to the potential.

The story and the direction has some gaping loop holes. And the movie does not indulge you enough to ignore them. Wish Neeraj Pandey had directed this one. The story had to be more layered and stronger. The songs in the movie are absolutely forgettable and avoidable but the background score is good. It’s shot on location in Mumbai and that’s really refreshing.

Finally, watch it once but don’t think too much. Avoiding it won’t be too anguishing either.