Stylish actors,wonderful locations,lots of side characters,wayward storyline all these sum up the context of Agent Vinod.Mark,I used only two positive things,which are actually the fairly good things in the movie,whereas the reason you should avoid it,is at the behest of the negative points.The movie seems as if cut-by-cut summary of 14 different movies(because of 14 different locations) with none of them providing apt understanding of the storyline and you end up asking yourself-"What was that?","Who was that?","Why was that?". Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor did justice to their character still the storyline & some poor editing made a mess of the movie.Songs were good still not upto the mark. All in all Agent Vinod is a stylish,sleek movie beyond a good and sensible storyline.If you find STYLE dominating SUBSTANCE as good,go for it,else its far far better to avoid it.

Despite having found the 2009 teaming of real life Bollywood power couple Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor in the terrorist Thriller Drama Kurbaan to be a paring that killed off any promise that the paternally exciting screenplay had to offer.

I decided,that since having heard the this film was a "dream project" for Saif,and that it was being directed by the man behind the highly praised Film Noir Johnny Gaddaar,I felt the there was a good chance that this Bollywood " Masala" 007 style film would offer some terrific thrills and a gripping,undercover spy storyline.

The plot:

After having escaped from a Taiban camp in Afghanistan,RAW (Indian secret service) Agent Vinod heads back to his headquarters in India,where he is told that his next mission is to find a man who murdered a fellow RAW agent in Russia,and who also has a scorpion tattoo and has some strange connection with the number "242".Rushing round in Russia,Vinold eventually finds out that a man called Freddie Khambatta is meant to be delivering 50 million to a powerful Mafia boss in Morocco.

Relaxing on his flight to Morocco,Vinod is left dumbfounded,when he discovers that Freddie Khambatta is working as a stewardess on this very flight!.Using his charms to win the trust of Khambatta,Vinod sneakily decides to take Freddie's identity,so that he can meet the cities local Mafia boss:David Kazan.Initially being terrified of Kazan sniffing out his cover,Vinod is almost caught out when Kazan's personal doctor, called Ruby Mendes (who actually works for the Pakistan secret service ISL),injects Vinod with some chemicals that force him to give all the real details.

Realiseing that his life is hanging by a thread,Vinod quickly shows all the stolen document proof the he can get his hands on,to prove that he really is Freddie Khambatta.With showing good imitative and also having a huge amount of luck,Kazan falls for his alibi and begins to show Vinod the "explosive" secret behind the number 242.

View on the film:

Looking at the main performances in this film,I was extremely disappointed to discover that despite filling dozens of magazines with their real life romance,Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor leave any signs of a sizzling chemistry completely off the screen,with the dozens of scenes that they both share lacking any sense of a "spark".Whilst the film was pacifically tailor made for him,Khan sadly gives a very wooden performance as Vinod,with the scenes of the agent risking his life to find out the truth behind "242" lacking any feeling from Saif of excitement or intense fear of being Vinod's cover being blown at any given moment.

Although Manish Malhotra's excellent costume design allows Kapoor to wear some eye-catching costumes,her flat performance sadly stops any of Ruby's fun flirtyness or paternally thrilling espionage skills to fully blossom in the film.Despite the two lead performances not having a strong,confident presence which is usually expected in epic Spy films,Prem Chopra shows that he can steel the film from right under everyone's noses.For his performance as Kazan,Chopra cleverly mixes the characters ruthlessness (such as killing his own, beloved camel!) with a strong comedic side that helps to light every scene that he features in,with the scenes of him attempting to develop a "closeness" with Ruby being a particularly hilarious highlight.

Using the "242" mystery as a Hitchcock style mcguffin for the film,writer/director Siram Raghavan at first shows signs that he is impressively going to mix James Bond style action with a Hitchcock Thriller edge.Sadly as the film plods along on its overstretched 2 and a half hour running time Raghavan gradually starts to show a clear lack of focus,as the initially intriguing mystery Thriller side disappointingly becomes a tangled mess,as Raghavan seems to spend more time focused on changing the films location every 5 minutes then he does from stopping the mystery side of the film from ending up as a flat-line.

Despite the action scenes weirdly only being in short bursts ,Siram uses the scenes to put his fantastic,stylish directing on full display,with a mesmerising,uninterrupted 3 and a half minute,one shot shoot out scene displaying the excitement and stylishness which should have been featured in the whole film.

You can't help but to compare India's latest cinematic spy with the established James Bond because of its many references drawn from what would be the longest and most famous spy film franchise. Agent Vinod still stands apart as his own man, although he could have picked up a leaf or two from Bond's formulaic book to keep the plot fairly interesting and chugging along, rather than to rely on a series of contrived conveniences that was fun while they had lasted, until it suffered from not knowing whether to keep up with the flamboyance of Bond movies, or to ground it more realistically to a world that Jason Bourne could have operated in.

Vinod does read from the same playbook. For starters, Bond cheats death almost all of the time, no thanks to villains who just love to break off into monologues, with preference to finish the spy off in the grandest way possible instead of putting a bullet in the head when opportunities arise. This leads to plenty of great escape moments, with Agent Vinod emulating the staple of Bond movies with a daring action piece before the opening credits roll. But because this is India, we don't get gyrating female silhouettes, but a nicely done animated sequence that would define Vinod the secret agent.

The task at hand is phenomenal just like any spy film that involves villains with megalomaniac plans to conquer the world, and here it includes a portable nuclear device that can fit into a backpack, being stolen and to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Encapsulating this plan is the mystery behind the number 242, and the Rubaiyat book of poetry, thus playing up real world concerns with a nuclear device falling into the wrong hands, and plays up Bond's cold war fears, in which case it would be nuclear Armageddon between arch rivals India and Pakistan.

Pakistan understandably had banned this film because it portrayed its officials as inept, corrupt and responsible for the plot to destroy India, but if one had watched the entire film, it presents a rather cautionary tale about the need to cooperate rather than to be arch-enemies, because being the latter exposes both sides to manipulation by world elites with resources wanting to exploit chaos for their own advancement, political or monetary, and this is what the real threat ultimately is about, and not as far fetched as one would think involving bullets and bombs, but that of an influential, shadow organization made up of the who's who in the world. But I suppose they don't take it too lightly to have their head of intelligence get finished off so simply, nor with a prime villain, the Colonel (Babu Antony),being of Pakistani origins and being unwittingly made use of like a pawn. But I digress.

Saif Ali Khan possesses the right amount of charisma and suaveness to pull off his character of an Indian RAW Agent who goes by the name of Vinod, but adopts multiple disguises and personalities in his tour of duty that he survives throughout with plenty of aliases. But even with such precautions taken, his rate of being captured rivals that of Bond's, as Vinod comes off very nearly as careless to a fault, never aware of his surroundings and being caught offguard for more times than I can care to remember. Worse, he doesn't have any fancy gadgets to rely on to make his great escapes. If this was Johnny English it would have been a very funny comedy, but playing it straight and serious just shows the ineptness of the spy we should be admiring instead.

Perhaps the only exception in characterization is Kareena Kapoor's Iram Parveen Bilal, who flip flops her allegiance and loyalty so many times, she becomes what could be a double agent, playing the side that's most advantageous to her at any given point. Despite being a real couple with Saif Ali Khan, their more romantic moments in the film come off as nothing more than sheer convenience, with little emotional grounding that somehow got worse and stretches the believability factor when the story decided to give the romantic arc a lot more focus in the finale. But from the get go until then, Iram is quite the force to be reckoned with, only so thanks to a series of plot conveniences and moments that go unexplained, and almost always to her advantage that this could have been called Agent Iram instead, that would have been a lot more interesting.

The action sequences could have been more defined rather than being quite derivative of other spy genre movies involving car and foot chases. Gun play also lapsed into the very generic styles and with villains always being hopeless marksmen when they have our hero as the sole running target to take down, with the other way round being plain opposites. Perhaps the only wow factor, that we see a lot getting designed in various films these days, is the singular extended tracking shot involving Vinod, with Iram in tow, grossly outnumbered but systematically taking down a bunch of goons in a motel. Other than that even the big bang finale was nothing more than a shadow of the George Clooney, Nicole Kidman starrer The Peacemaker involving the downtown hunt for a lone terrorist carrying a deadly explosive device.

Still, for a spy film, Agent Vinod had its moments, the rare ones as described in the action sequence above. If only it had taken a more straightforward route with a solidly grounded, diabolical plot, and did without the many loopholes and conveniences, and given Vinod a lot more personality traits, then we would have seen a potential for a growing franchise. Unfortunately Vinod limps rather than wows, and such is its wasted potential.