“Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos” is the kind of parody you don’t often see in Bollywood. If you are aware of the comedy troupe, the Lonely Island, headed by the supremely funny Andy Samberg, you’d be somewhat sequenced to what Vir Das has to offer. Co-directed by Kavi Shastri, the film is still pretty out of tune with what you would want from a comedy. The jokes aren’t laugh-out-loud-funny because there is a constant undercurrent of self-awareness that either slices the joke in half or lets it go on for a little too long for it to land in the traditional sense. The result is a film that pokes holes into Bollywood stereotypes within the bounds of a frustrating but endearing spy-spoof.
The proceeding kicks off with a prologue that takes place in the 90s, somewhere in Goa. A local gangster is killed by two British MI-7 agents who then escape back to their homeland, taking the orphaned kid of the housemaid who also gets killed in the crossfire. They raise the Indian kid as their own – although out of sheer stroke of luck or some destiny, or the fact that the kid grows up with two dads – he loves ballet and making sandwiches instead of guns or solving crime. He is Happy (played by Vir Das), and the plot is super-eager to reveal that he is Patel and not British.
He is then roped into a silly as a stick spy plot where the MI-7 recruits him to rescue one of their citizens who has been captured by a sly gangster named Mama (played by Mona Singh) – a local goon who is secretly building a formula in a lab that will manufacture skin-lightening products for dark skinned Indian and then send them over for exploitation in the West. So Happy Patel is trained in combat – not with guns and violence, but by being shown Bollywood movies that help him understand the culture, the suave, and the style of being a macho-gentleman.
His arrival in Goa is met with a barrage of side-characters – Geet (Sharib Hashmi), his local side-kick who gets an instant ‘Daddy’ sized erection each time Happy spreads his arms in SRK-styled mating call, Roxy (Srushti Tawde) – a local rep, a hacker, a healer and whatnot, designed to take care of Happy if he hits some form of roadblock, and Rupa Kumari (Mithila Palkar) – designated love-interest who is the worst dancer in all of Pandor (the area of Goa where Happy is assigned) who gets a slap-sized itch each time some guy (mostly Happy) touches her.
On paper, these are pretty interesting, albeit too over-the-top characters who would definitely make you have a good time at the movies, but on screen, the sparks never really fly. Unlike Kunal Khemu’s directorial debut last year – the supremely funny “Madgaon Express” which also had some of the touches of a similar kind of humor – Das’s film is never able to settle into a situation for the jokes to be as clever as they are intended to be. It also doesn’t help that all these characters are so practically juvenile that the humor that is supposed to come out of their weirdness is instantly deflated by gags that show up tagging along with them.
One of the running gags includes Happy Patel’s broken Hindi accentuating ‘tum’ as ‘tom,’ leading a tourist named Tom showing up on screen to see if anyone has called him. There are also a few too many elaborate scenes of Mama seductively playing with her home-made cutlets – these deadly doses of deep-fried goodness that she stores for special occasions of fuck-up by one of her henchmen. Also in the mix should be a really slow-moving waiter who also happens to have an OnlyFans page – because why not? I mean, all of these sound intriguing on the page and to some extent they are, but most of them do not land or as elasticised to an extent where they no longer seem smart and/or funny.
Which is extremely disheartening because “Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos” is the kind of comedy we need – it is light on its feet, is deliciously anti-establishment (look out for subtle political digs), and has the kind of satirical anti-macho energy that is the need for the hour. Sadly, it feels like we spend too much time with this funny set of people and do not laugh that often. It’s like a failed comedy sketch that is not able to redeem itself, even with crowd work.
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