Code Name: Tiranga Review: Parineeti Chopra’s Spy Thriller is Worse than Bad

Director and writer: Ribhu Dasgupta

Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Harrdy Sandhu, Sharad Kelkar, Rajit Kapur

Just as spies tend to be haunted by memories of failed missions, film critics watching Code Name: Tiranga might be haunted by memories of watching Dhaakad. The trauma is not unfounded. Both the Hindi female-spy thrillers feature protagonists named after Hindu deities: Kangana Ranaut was Agent Agni, Parineeti Chopra is Agent Durga. Both the plots (?) revolve around agency bosses who may or may not be traitors. And last but not the least, both films are gloriously inept – so single-minded in their quest to look cool that they play out like globe-trotting parodies of themselves. Code Name: Tiranga is a bigger slog to sit through because even its jingoism feels pretentious. I tried very hard to be offended – by a terrorist named “Omar Khalid”; by the demonizing of everything and everyone Pakistani; by a Vande Mataram song scoring Durga’s Call-of-Duty-esque rampage through an army of baddies (it’s not shot like a video-game; it is a video-game) – but staying awake was of utmost priority.

The flags are too red to be tri-colour. The film opens with a wounded Durga stumbling through the snow, with her voiceover overdosing on the word “zindagi,” making it sound like she’s reading out one of her old post-midnight Facebook posts. But she seems to be sad. The rest of the film tells us how she got here. She was once deep undercover in Kabul as a burkha-clad journalist named Israt. Her mission is to track down Omar Khalid (Sharad Kelkar), the elusive mastermind behind a Parliament bombing twenty years ago. She befriends a Turkish-Indian doctor, Mirza Ali (Harrdy Sandhu), to achieve this. But like any self-respecting movie spy, she falls for Mirza while ‘using’ him. How do we know this? In their song together, she becomes a human National Geographic cover: embracing baby goats, walking through ruins and playing football with Afghan kids. What is this if not love?

Her mission – which culminates in a long and boring shootout at a wedding – fails miserably. She feels guilty about deceiving Mirza, but her next mission (titled, of course, Code Name: Tiranga) is to eliminate a turncoat from her team. For this, she must infiltrate Omar’s home in Turkey, where the man is being held hostage, which raises the questions: Why didn’t she do this to begin with? What was the whole point of going undercover? And why is killing a Hindu traitor now a bigger priority than capturing a deadly assassin? That last question is rhetorical. Things go awry again, and an injured Durga crosses paths with Mirza, a fortuitous event that allows her to say things like “Goli pehli baar nahi lagi, but dard pehli baar ho raha hai (This isn’t the first time I’ve been shot, but it’s the first time it hurts)”. By now, a livid Omar is out to kill this pesky agent Durga, and things go South (or Middle East) when poor Mirza gets caught in this chaos.

Code Name: Tiranga doesn’t quite understand the language of action cinema. For instance, the staging has no sense of space – at one point, we see Durga take a phone call on a random road, far away from her handler, only so that Omar can sneak up on her in a car (which she apparently can’t hear). At another point, she goes from a bloodbath in a mansion to a snowy cemetery in the mountains. There's also no emotional continuity (I can't believe I'm trying to be constructive in my criticism here), especially when Durga suffers a tragedy, goes through a running-mascara sad song and then indulges in a long-drawn revelation scene where she smirks while explaining to the mole how she nailed him.

The performances are strange. Parineeti Chopra manages to overact with her eyes alone in the burkha-clad portions. A scene where she's smoking and plotting her next move looks like a Dirty Harry audition tape. She moves well in the more physical sequences, but the frantic editing never really lets us admire that. An evergreen Rajit Kapur plays her handler, and in the more agile sequences, he either screams "haraamkhor!" or simply disappears after driving Durga to her destinations. The brief to Shishir Sharma, who plays the murky ISI boss, seems to be: Do an Amitabh Bachchan voice at any cost. These are some fine actors on their day, but this is not their day. This is not your day. This is not my day. This is nobody's day. Not even the teen girl who wrote about "zindagi" on Facebook all those years ago after reading Kafka for the first time.