Neeraj Pandey’s new flick ‘Naam Shabana’ spins around 2 genres that is revenge and spy thriller. While the revenge part is meted out in typical Bollywood style, he resorts to his own style when handling the thriller. With this movie, Neeraj Pandey passes the baton to Shivam Nair spinoff of his earlier flick Baby. While it would be a surprise to know that Neeraj has written , he hasn’t directed the film. Naam Shabana is known to be India’s first story of the making of a spy, and one among several movies headlined by heroines, does not quite live up to audience’s expectations. After the dynamic act of Akshay Kumar in Baby and Special 26, Neeraj pandey could not fill up the expectations by giving him a guest appearance in the movie moreover it is a parallel lead in terms of importance and weightage of the characters. A great question triggers in the mind of the audience that is Naam Shabana a feminist movie? The answer comes out to be No as in the film, Akshay Kumar is the one who drags Shabana to safety quite often. And whenever he holds her, it is by the arm, not hands. In another instance Manoj i.e. Ranvir Singh tells Shabana, “Auratein preconfigured aati hain, they are born spies. Men need gadgets.” You know, because that’s what women do, act all suspicious specially on their husbands.
In the other part of the film, Taapsee looks powerful and dangerous in the action sequences, thanks to Cyrill Raffaeli and Abbas Ali Moghul, the action directors. However, she seems to be a bit uncomfortable in the scenes that require her to portray emotion in a theatrical manner. She is very unconvincing as the woman who keeps her emotions bottled up but is extremely passionate in reality. Coming to the support cast, Danny Denzongpa, Manoj Bajpayee and Anupam Kher are good in their roles but the script does not allow them to help raise the film to a respectable level. If we come to the final nail of the film, then it is the incessant annoying background music which blares non-stop and makes this film even longer than it is. ”Naam Shabana” leaves you with a troublesome question: why create a heroine in the action hero mode, with both mind and heart, and then give her a big bro to ‘help’ her out? This results in second-guessing your biggest asset, wondering if she is a liability.
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