In the opening scenes of Sudhanshu Saria’s spy thriller Ulajh, Janhvi Kapoor’s Suhana Bhatia is introduced to the audience as an intelligent, fast-thinking, smart and decisive foreign service official.

A nepo baby in the world of diplomats — her father Dhanraj (Adil Hussain) is a legend in the circuit — Suhana is soon promoted to deputy high commissioner to the UK, becoming the youngest Indian to hold such a high position. It’s an appointment that even her father thinks she has got because of her name, as do most of the juniors at the Indian embassy in the UK.

Suhana unfortunately proves them right when she makes several questionable decisions that land her in a situation where she is blackmailed by the ISI (because of course it has to be Pakistan) into sharing confidential information, including the name of RAW agents in Pakistan. And she inadvertently sets in motion a plan to assassinate the peacenik Pakistani prime minister who is visiting India to start a war.

What are those questionable decisions that make us question Suhana’s intelligence, you ask. Well, why would the deputy high commissioner leave with a random chef — Gulshan Devaiah as Nakul Sharma looks very suspect — on a bike without any security? What happened to vetting a person before getting into bed? So what Nakul made a video of them having sex and threatened to release it? Wouldn’t it have been better to tell your boss you are being blackmailed than give in without any resistance?

Then there are contrivances, like anyone being able to log onto computers with critical information which are just lying around. Or the fact that a trained operative like Nakul is unaware of being followed by Suhana, who doesn’t even try too hard to hide. Or how easy it is to bug the house of a high-up RAW official. Yep, it’s the amateur plot — how does a person who is hell-bent on exposing Suhana have a change of heart in a minute? There are many more of such contrivances — that is the undoing of the film. The cast puts in a brave effort but is undermined by the poor writing.

Janhvi kind of fits the bill of a nepo baby in the first half of the film, bringing in the glam quotient but very little of the intelligence. She comes into her own in the second half, justifying her billing as the lead. Janhvi is, however, overshadowed by the performances of Devaiah as the main antagonist and Roshan Mathew as Sebin Josephkutty, a raw official (or is he?) posted at the Indian High Commission in the UK. Unfortunately, in order to put Janhvi’s character front and centre, Ulajh leaves these secondary characters — Jacob Tamang (Meiyang Chang) and Salim Sayeed (Rajesh Tailang) are a few of the others — underdeveloped.

If Ulajh follows through on the hint that there are more spy films on the cards with Janhvi in the lead, one hopes her character will use the intelligence she is said to have (but doesn’t use) in a film that is better plotted.