Aiyaary: Not up there

*ing: Naseeruddin Shah, Anupam Kher, Manoj Bajpayee, Sidharth Malhotra, Rakul Preet Singh, Pooja Chopra, Adil Hussain

Rated: 6/10

Neeraj Pandey without Akshay Kumar? Naaa! The biggest niggle of this otherwise honestly intentioned film is the absence of Akshay’s inimitable presence as a super spook ahead of one and all. Instead there is Manoj Bajpai and Siddharth Malhotra doing the honours of this here and there spy thriller from the same man who hit it big with films like A Wednesday, Baby, Special 26, Naam Shabana and Rustom to name a few.

Pandey’s acumen notwithstanding, this one is a not so tight, not so slick, somewhat straying international spy thriller unfolding in London and India. Siddharth Malhotra looks good and does a fine job of his assignment as does Bajpai but something somewhere is left missing — and that something is the innate thrill of being with Pandey in such ventures. In this one, he fails to stick to the job and often gets emotional. The result is the needless meandering into side stories of romance, going into flashbacks for slim reasons and leaving the hunt somewhat unexplained.

Bajpai tries much too hard to blend into the corrupt system as an upright Army major, and Malhotra gets going without much of a mission. Loosely interwoven into the proceedings are splashes of real-time happenings like the arms procuring scam in the Army, the Army widows housing scam and the inherent corruption in the entire political system.

A loftily ideated film that could have done better had it not gone into the sidewalks where veterans like Anupm Kher and Naseeruddin Shah get wasted without rhyme or reason.

Source: Published in Sunday Pioneer, 18 February, 2018