Happy Patel Khatarnak Jasoos movie review: Wacky buffoonery and an unlikely spy

Vir Das and Kavi Shastri’s directorial debut is many things. It’s a sharp commentary on the Western gaze. It’s an incisive takedown of Hindi cinema’s current spy obsession. It’s an amusing, experimental scattershot sketch comedy. What it’s not is a cohesive feature film.

At 121 minutes, it’s absurd to the point of being bizarre. Das, Shastri and co-writer Amogh Ranadive stuff Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos with interesting ideas but don’t give any of them the room to cook. The director-duo has too many tricks up their sleeve and are eager to bedazzle. If only they weren’t in such a hurry. The film is bursting at the seams with jokes, gags and punchlines. Some land, most don’t.

Das plays the eponymous Happy Patel, the adopted son of a British gay couple, both of whom were MI6 agents. Raised in London, he has a strong affinity for cooking and ballet. All is well until he finds out that he is Indian. Before you can make sense of it, he is shipped to India on a mission as inane as everything else in the film.

Das is in every frame. One of contemporary India’s most erudite comics, he is charming and bumbling as Happy. But I could not surrender to the make-believe. Das is so intrinsically himself in the film that he, not for one moment, is convincing as the wannabe spy. Vir Das keeps coming in the way of Happy Patel.

However, it doesn’t mean the film doesn’t have moments of inspired silliness. You need to watch what Das does with our collective mania for fair skin, British accent, Shah Rukh Khan, spices, and Bollywood dancing. There are also several contextual gags. For instance, the number of times Happy gets slapped in the film is Das’s reply to his trolls who think he has a very “slappable face.”

Much has been made of Aamir Khan and Imran Khan’s cameos. But it is the supporting cast that grounds Happy Patel so that its unlikely hero can run wild in all directions. Mona Singh in Aamir Khan movies is a mood. Though her character is not as fleshed out here as it was in Laal Singh Chadha (2022),

she is delightful as Mama, the feared don of Panjore and Happy’s dreaded adversary who loves making cutlets and watching Sanjeev Kapoor’s cookery shows.

They have precious little to do but Mithila Palkar, Sharib Hashmi and Srushti Tawde give meaning to the madness as they become Happy’s inner circle. Since this is Vir Das and Aamir Khan’s second film together, a comparison with the first is inevitable. Happy Patel doesn’t have Delhi Belly’s raw edginess, cinematic heft or recall value. The Abhinay Deo directorial was a one-of-a-kind, genre-defining caper when it came out 15 years ago.

Meanwhile, Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos is an earnest outing in which anything goes and the whole isn’t necessarily greater than the sum of its parts. But in a cinematic landscape overrun with violence and hypermasculinity, a film promising gentle buffoonery is a welcome change. It’s also a massive win for the two directors who started as extras in Bollywood to get to make their own movie and release it exactly as they wanted to, warts and all.