Agent Review

By 12 pm on Friday April 28th, the verdict was already out: Agent was a horror show, a big floppity flop - yet another failed attempt to launch the star kid Akhil Akkineni. Twitter was ablaze with memes and reaction videos of first-day-first-show viewers exiting the theatre. One guy, with folded hands, urged Akhil to stop harassing the audience with such movies. Harassing! I received a text from a reviewer friend calling it the "worst movie of the year".

Ayyagaru - the name given to the actor by a superfan, and a name that has stuck on, as much as a moniker as a joke - was a disappointment.

Meanwhile, I was lapping up Mani Ratnam's Ponniyin Selvan 2 next door. If Agent was an unmitigated disaster, then what was even the point of suffering through it? Writing a bad review of it would be akin to torturing a fallen man.

So I decided on a little experiment: I would watch the movie not as a critic, but as a well-wisher. I would look for what was good - if there was any good.

To give away the punchline of my experiment - I walked out ten minutes before the movie ended.

To be honest, the first half hour of the movie was good enough that I wondered what all the fuss was about. Akhil plays Vicky, an ethical hacker, and a wannabe spy agent for the respected RAW organization that catches international criminals. Akhil's family is sweet and funny (Murali Sharma plays his dad).

RAW is headed by Mr. Mahadev (Mammootty), codenamed Devil. RAW's greatest foe is a crime syndicate known as ...well, Syndicate, headed by a burly man named God (Dino Morea). So there is a God, a Devil, a Syndicate. Simple, easy to follow.

Except the siren song of Agent is that it is WILD. Vicky is a "Wild Saala" - "unpredictable, untameable and untrainable". To drive this point through, Vicky does the most eccentric things. Just in the first half of the movie he goes grocery shopping with his mother; woos a girl and then sends her packing; joins hands with a criminal politician and then kills him as well as his sixty-odd henchmen in an outlandish fight sequence that finds him dancing as he rains bullets into a sea of men. Later, he piles the dead bodies into a giant heap and takes a selfie with them - this is the last frame before the interval.

Yet, it gets worse. So much worse. There is a scene in which Mammootty and Akhil stand off against the bad guys, with Mammootty on Akhil's shoulders. Just the silhouette of this chimera is unsettling to behold. The story gets unbearable in the second half, just flapping around like a headless chicken before it goes limp at the end.

I can understand why people want to blame the director Surender Reddy for the fiasco. The boisterous way in which the characters were interpreted is just too much to bear. Dino Morea's villain character is like a chimp at the zoo, bellowing, glowering, and just falling short of thumping his chest. Akhil, who I thought was entirely watchable despite his character's ridiculous mannerism, looks trapped by the story. Only Mammootty is spared from embarrassing lines - or at least he has enough gravitas and skill to come off as a decent character.

The script, written by Vakkantham Vamsi, is a farce. It is vaguely imitative of Pathaan's story - an ex-spy with a Pakistani girlfriend goes rogue because his job requires too much sacrifice - and its tone is like that of Liger - loud and stupid - but Agent is far more psychotic version of both.

It was during the last stretch of the movie, when the "wild" angle falls apart and it becomes just another cowardly spy story, that I decided to walk out. By this time, the clock struck 10 pm and I didn't want to spend another minute watching it.

Getting out of the theatre I got stuck in a massive traffic jam. I yelled cuss words, that I freshly incorporated into my brain from watching the Wild Saala, at drivers who tried to cut in before me. I texted my friend and confirmed that the movie ended exactly as I predicted it would. I sped home and tried to forget I ever saw Agent.