Thriller with no thrill

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If you’ve invited guests over for a special occasion and you plan on making chocolate cake, your signature dish, you may decide to dress it up with some delicate shavings, a sauce, even cocoa or sugar powder. You may even place a fine orange rind on one side, for effect and a bit of zest. What you will not do is shove gulab jamuns and rasgullas into your chocolate cake, stick in the gaps bits of jalebi, push in kulfi sticks, pour a bowl of kheer and then cover it all up with silver varakh. One bite and your guests will know it’s not a chocolate cake; it’s a nervous breakdown.

Agent Vinod is that chocolate cake gone wrong, and Sriram Raghavan is that gourmet chef having an epileptic fit in his own kitchen. Raghavan is the same man who gave us two perfect chocolate cakes — Ek Hasina Thi and Johnny Gaddaar, deliciously dark doozies both. But now he is clueless, doesn’t know what to do, and is scared of stopping. So he just goes overboard, buying every ingredient that the producer’s money can afford, and runs hither-thither in search of meaning, substance, a raison d’etre for his Agent Vinod. Finding none, he decides to just roam, splurge and hope and pray that his film will make Rs 200 crore.
But his chocolate cake has gone so wrong that every time you see something brown and take a bite, you taste jalebi syrup mixed with milk and bits of rice.
The thing these days with big-budget, cleverly marketed films, where luscious locations and women are thrown in generously, is that they are meant to bedazzle — to make the audience forget that there is no story, and that no one has any idea why what is happening is happening. Everything, every expense, is but a means without meaning to one end: glory at the box office. This sort of cynicism, for one’s own art and towards the audience’s intelligence is nauseating.
No one was expecting Le Carre’s Smiley, or Ludlum’s Bourne, even Fleming’s Bond, though at various times we were told we'd get bits of Bourne, Bond and Tintin.
Well, Agent Vinod is Tintin insomuch as Tintin In the Land of Soviets, Tintin in Congo, Tintin and the Picaros, i.e. Agent Vinod is a globe-trotting, vaulting man in search of India-threatening secrets and baddies. He risks his life with a view to saving mankind. Apart from that, there’s no likeness to any spies or eager beavers we have seen before. Agent Vinod is a vacuous man who is mighty chuffed to get into tuxedos, crash cars, shoot bullets and dig into the miserable dish Raghavan has slapped together.

Agent Vinod’s first battleground is Dasht-e-Margoh (Desert of Death, Afghanistan), where he is being held captive by one Lokha (Shahbaz Khan), while his compatriot, Major Rajan (Ravi Kissen), is hovering about, blowing into a mouth organ. Some questions are asked, some answers are given, but all is very vague and we are confused about what Indian trigger-happy secret agents are doing in Afghanistan. We are also distracted by the stunning landscape, and the stone house whose outer wall has a large portrait of Osama bin Laden.
But Agent Vinod ka dimag computer se bhi tez chalta hai and his limbs obey his quick commands. Despite the bazookas, he escapes, shooting men while skittering from one ceiling to another, reducing vehicles to balls of fire and rescuing a hot belly dancer from a gunny bag. Agent Vinod pauses, but decides to put her slinky thigh to practical use. No hanky-panky. It’s all very platonic because the film is dedicated to Abba.
Cut to Borodino, Moscow, where one mafia don has been killed who may have developed the world’s first suitcase N-bomb or some such thingamajig. On board the Trans-Siberian Express we meet a large hairy man, Abu Nazer (Ram Kapoor), who is in conversation with Colonel (Adil Hussain) about $50 million, N-bomb and "242". Major Rajan, under flimsy cover, gets caught and killed, but only after he Skypes vital information about “India pe attack” to his boss at the Research & Analysis Wing in Delhi.
Agent Vinod is the man for the mission to save Bharat Mata. He dashes off to Moscow where he bashes up Abu Nazer to the convoluted strains of Ra Ra Rasputin and gets his next clue: Morocco. En route, he picks up a gay boy, Freddie Khambata, takes his identity and dollar (a code), and delivers it to David Kazaan (Prem Chopra), who is in mourning over the death of his beloved camel. There he meets Dr Ruby (Kareena Kapoor) aka Iram, who may or may not be involved in London Bombings, and who may or may not be a Pakistani ISI agent.
Tamil Tigers, MI6 agents, dodgy businessmen, Iram’s suspicious ways, the elusive Colonel, double-crossing agents; Non-nuclear bomb blasts, truth serum, chases, in cars, autos, on bikes, humourless thain-thain, people falling dead, and a few moments of soul talk with Iram -- nothing comes in the way of Agent Vinod figuring out that Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is no longer a mystical world in verse, but the detonator of a devastating bomb that’s headed to India. He goes after it, from Riga to Somalia to Karachi, and finally to Delhi, where the bomb is ticking close to Old Delhi’s monuments that look especially vulnerable when shot from a certain angle.

Agent Vinod ponders several critical questions — the real profiteers of jihad, India’s role in Afghanistan, the efficiency of Indian secret agencies, the power of one-to-one emotional talk between Indian and Pakistani officials — but it can’t decide whether it’s a silly Seventies film, like its 1977 namesake, or a slick spy action-thriller that whizzes through cities that are on most spy itineraries. So it decides to be both.
But it lacks a story. So, like kids who don’t know the answer to a test question, and decide to write long sentences, all gibberish, in tiny, squiggly letters stuck to one another, in the hope that ma’am won’t understand and give them at least passing marks, Agent Vinod mades do with a crinkum-crankum plot. And to cover up the absence of coherence in the plot, it gives us dizzy camera angles in hyper mode, often with peppy but inappropriate and distracting music from Pritam. All this is made worse by dialogues that are plain annoying, including the pathetic attempts at humour.
Add to this Saif Ali Khan’s Agent Vinod, who is a swashbuckling bad joke. He’s occasionally charming, but is just not bright enough to impress us. We get a brief glimpse into his soul — he likes swinging between zindagi aur maut — but it’s just chocolate with jalebi syrup.
Kareena is mediocre, as is most of the supporting cast, and Saif's chemistry with his leading lady is thanda.
Agent Vinod has one or two nice scenes, like the shootout in a hotel lobby in Riga which is stylish, lyrical, like the ballad that plays in the background. But like all things here, it’s meshed in with so much claptrap that you don’t really care.