Naam Shabana Movie Review: Watch It Only For Taapsee Pannu

A few years back, Neeraj Pandey and Akshay Kumar had teamed up for a crack spy thriller named Baby, which had made us confident that Bollywood has finally arrived when it comes to spy fiction on the silver screen.

The film was such a big hit that it encouraged the makers to make a separate film on one of the characters from Baby named Shabana (Taapsee Pannu) and thus was Naam Shabana conceived. However, does it match up to the brilliance of Baby? Do read on...

The events in this film occur three years before Baby and revolves around Shabana Khan (Taapsee Pannu), a girl with a dark past, who is recruited by Ranveer (Manoj Bajpayee), a senior officer of a secret agency, who also  helps her seek revenge for the murder of her boyfriend. Shabana is trained to be a killing machine and is soon deployed to eliminate Mikhail, a ruthless arms dealer, who was responsible for killing two Indian agents in Austria. How Shabana manages to accomplish her mission with the help of her senior officer Ajay Singh Rathod (Akshay Kumar), forms the rest of the plot.

Taapsee, who made people sit up and take notice in Pink, is quite good in her action scenes as well as her intense and dramatic scenes in the film and it is evident that the girl has put in her blood, tears and sweat in this role. Bajpayee is quite decent 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 utterly wasted in a badly written role while Akshay Kumar in his cameo, is effortlessly cool...

A film featuring an ass-kicking female protagonist is bound to be liked by everyone and Naam Shabana does have its moments, though that doesn’t mean the numerous flaws in the film are to be ignored. For example: Shabana immediately agrees to work for Ranveer when he promises her retribution without even asking once about the agency that Ranveer belongs to (for all she knows, Ranveer could have been an ISI recruiter fooling gullible Indians into working for an enemy agency). In the first scene of the film, a pair of agents yell ‘Freeze’ at the man they have been ordered to eliminate and end up getting killed in the process (what’s with the ‘freeze’ when the agents have the go-ahead to terminate? Too many American movies?) In another scene, Ranveer glibly confesses that their agency tracks thousands of people, which frankly sounds creepy. Plus, it seems that apart from Ajay and Shabana, all Indian agents are a bunch of bumbling fools who cannot even protect themselves against an unarmed suspect even when they are carrying automatic pistols (RAW officials are sure to wince at a few scenes from the movie).

Another major flaw that the film suffers from is its tacky production values and its unimpressive special effects. There is a difference between a low-budget film and a poorly made film and sadly, this film falls in the latter category.

Nevertheless, if you are a Taapsee Pannu film, Naam Shabana could definitely work for you...