I am a fan of spy thrillers. I start watching any spy thriller movie with great enthusiasm. But the genre has become so saturated with the usual tropes of storytelling that it will need some kickass innovation from the writers/filmmakers to reinvent the genre. I had binge-watched director Ribhu Dasgupta’s web series Bard of Blood on Netflix and enjoyed it. So, I had high hopes for Code Name: Tiranga.
The film starts well with the romantic track between Parineeti Chopra and Harrdy Sandhu. If you have watched numerous spy thrillers, you will know that Harrdy’s Mirza is going to be the weakness or the redemption for Parineeti’s Ismat/Durga to live a normal life again. Both actors have good screen presence. Harrdy does well as the half-Indian half-Turkish doctor deployed in pre-Taliban Afghanistan by the UN.
Parineeti’s Durga is not as much about her physicality as it is about her attitude. Which is good. Spies are essentially chosen to be spies for their intellect, not six-pack abs. As much as I enjoy James Bond movies, I enjoy Jack Ryan, too, for his sheer vulnerability. That gives him so much character. I liked the fatigue and pain Parineeti carries in her demeanour throughout the film. This is not a part where the filmmaker or the actor tries to show that a girl can do everything a guy can (the voice-over at the end seemed unnecessary, though). It was refreshing to see her femininity being retained despite being thrown into the badlands essentially created by men.
In Code Name: Tiranga, there are moments here and there that are thrilling. But you have seen the prolonged delay in picking up confirmation calls, a spy going rogue, identity being exposed and all that before. I can understand that things might still be happening that way but the material can be handled differently, isn’t it? Otherwise, why would you want to make just another spy movie?
The film was shot during the Covid pandemic. In that regard, it’s a commendable effort to pull off a thriller that involves a lot of action and outdoor shoots. Code Name Tiranga is almost entirely shot in Turkey. The action choreography is good but does not produce moments of awe. The plot twists are revealed in an uneven way. The lack of grip on the narrative is true for the entire length of the film. There’s not a single point where the film as they say ‘kicks in’.
The villain in the film, Khaled Omar (Sharad Kelkar), is said to be involved in the attacks on the Indian Parliament in the early 2000s. We don’t get to know what his character is other than what he did. Apart from Durga, all the characters are thinly written and the performances rely more on hamming. It is disheartening to see films that are well-intended but shoddily executed. Code Name Tiranga is one such noble failure.
