Mission Majnu, directed by Shantanu Bagchi, is a superhero period drama about an Indian spy embedded in Pakistan whose superpower is his good looks, cute smile and affable charm with which he can get everyone, from random strangers to seasoned brigadiers, to become garrulous and divulge all kinds of information.
Before you scoff at me, let me explain. Tariq Ali (Sidharth Malhotra) is a young man in Rawalpindi in the 1970s who did God knows what for a living till he lands a job as a tailor just by his charm and his diligence in performing the namaz five times a day. The day he goes to confirm his job he falls in love with Nasreen (Rashmika Mandanna), the blind niece of the owner of the shop, woos her and marries her.
But after their successful nuclear test in 1974, Indian intelligence gets wind of a secret nuclear facility being set up in Pakistan as retaliation and activates its dormant RAW agents for what is called Mission Majnu. And one of them is our mohalle ka darzi Tariq, who is actually Amandeep Ajitpal Singh, a soldier whose father, according to flashbacks and constant taunts from his handler, was a gaddar who sold some top-secret blueprints to Pakistan. Something that, apart from his outstanding academic records, makes him the most suitable man for the job, according RAW chief Mr Kao. Because he will do anything for his country to make up for what his father had done.
You are amazed by how good an actor Tariq is as he woos Nasreen, his cover, till you realise that she is pregnant with his child, and he just might actually be in love with her. But only you seem to be worried about the consequences of this development because Amadeep Ajitpal Singh is, quite clearly, unconcerned.
Mission Majnu states that it is loosely based on true events and my heart goes out for the man who had to choose between his duty and love for his country and his duty and love towards his wife and unborn child. And the film would have benefitted from taking a break from superhuman sleuthing techniques to focus on adding layers to the character of the man who is at the centre of the film.
But we digress. Once tasked with the responsibility of finding out where the nuclear plant is being set up, Tariq, our superspy, starts gathering information using his superpowers and some lucky circumstances. This includes being called in to sew on buttons on a brigadier’s coat in front of him instead of having the coat sent to the shop; a eureka moment that comes when his wife wants to use the toilet; another eureka moment where he realises how to get evidence of the facility when he overhears a doctor while waiting for his wife at the hospital.
He manages to get a brigadier in the army spill the beans about how Pakistan was indeed building atom bombs, had involved a national scientist from abroad and that the facility was around Rawalpindi — all of it top secret — just with his smile and charm. He goes on the hunt for a western-style commode in order to track down the name of the scientist and gets the owner of a shop to not only randomly spout information about work he did for the government a few years back but also hand over the address of the place.
His superpowers — the smile and the affability — blind people so much that they don’t find it strange that a regular guy hands over Rs 600 without even bargaining and that you can’t just hand over government contract details. His superpower gets him past guards who never think to verify “madamji bulaya hai” and gets a neighbouring granny to spill details about the “pathan” and his English wife who had lived there. Wait, why were the police guarding a road that led to an empty house and is it a compound? What did the visitors to neighbours think about being interrogated every time they dropped into any of the other houses? Never mind.
What must have been a truly difficult task in the 1970s without the technology we have at out disposal today seems to be comically simple and that’s another strike against the film. Mission Majnu had real potential to be an edge-of-the-seat thriller and a nuanced look at being behind enemy lines but loses out to happy coincidences and an overdose of anti-Pakistani sentiment with a side of overindulgent patriotism.
Most of the Pakistani characters in Mission Majnu are caricatures, from the cake-shovelling Prime Minister Bhutto (Rajat Kapoor) to the comic cartoon-like portrayal of General Zia-ul-Haq to the Stormtrooper army men. No, they weren’t actual Stormtroopers but all of them seem to have their legendary bad aim with their guns. The Indian counterparts weren’t any better with Indira Gandhi in a ridiculous wig, Morarji Desai setting up a personal home-line phone call to discuss yoga with General Haq, and a RAW agent handler who does worse to his spies in Pakistan than any Pakistani could.
In terms of acting, the only person who stood out was Kumud Mishra as Raman Singh/Maulvi Sahab, another RAW agent who Tariq teams up with. Rashmika has little to do other than look pretty and in love and is treated like the collateral damage that she is to the mission. Sidharth does well as a charming young man making a life in Rawalpindi but he doesn’t have the acting chops to pull off the nuances of being a spy. His Tariq is indistinguishable from Amandeep and that is a shame. And he is so shady while hunting for information that it is a little wonder that no one realises he is a spy.
The subpar writing and the lack of nuance in performances keep Mission Majnu hanging in a limbo, somewhere between a spy spoof and a poor stab at patriotism. There are moments of thrill, sure, but they are really undermined by some ridiculous happenstance. If even 30 per cent of what is shown in the film happened in reality, then Mission Majnu really isn’t an apt ode to those real-life heroes. They definitely deserved better.
