A Brit-raised Indian spy returns to his homeland for a mission, and all kinds of mayhem breaks out. There are some big laughs, but the jokes get repetitive after a while. Even at two hours, the film feels padded out. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
It’s no accident that Happy Patel: Khatarnaak Jasoos sounds like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This spy, too, is a good-natured idiot, and the mission is less important than the gags that come at us with the frequency of machine-gun bullets. The opening stretch is very funny. The film, directed by Vir Das and Kavi Shastri, opens in Goa. I found it hilarious that an Englishman was named Mr. White. Aamir Khan contributes a very fun cameo, as does Sumukhi Suresh. And the absurdity is top-notch, like in a line about “frisky camels” or in the on-screen captions. Spy movies usually give us place-and-time captions like “2003, Somewhere in South Africa…” In Happy Patel, we get captions that tell us the population of a random town in England. Happy himself is a wonderfully absurd creature. He may be a terrible spy, but he can make beautiful sandwiches while dancing ballet.
The theatre I watched the film in had subtitles, but not the usual kind where, for example, “Main theek hoon” is translated to “I am okay.” Here, the Marathi lines get proper translations in the English subtitles. But if a character speaks Hindi and says “Main theek hoon”, the subtitles show the same thing (that is, “Main theek hoon”) in the Roman alphabet. And while this is going to be of no help for a non-Hindi speaker to understand the movie, it does help us understand Happy, whose Hindi is as absurd as he is. Happy was raised in England by two British fathers, and he has to learn Hindi from scratch. So when he means “bhookh”, as in hunger, he pronounces it as “book”. When he means “tum”, as in you, he pronounces it as “Tom”, and this gives the film a running-gag character named Tom who appears every time Happy utters his name while actually meaning “tum”. This is the rare film that keeps you looking at the subtitles even if you know the language because these subtitles are filled with Happy’s language mistakes and are a lot of fun.
The story tackles India’s obsession with fairness, and there’s a hilarious supporting character who keeps growing white to an alarming degree. He is controlled by this film’s villain, played by Mona Singh. She is great, and the screen is filled with very likeable actors like Vir Das and Mithila Palkar and Sharib Hashmi, and there are cameos from Imran Khan and a bunch of others. But the LOL insanity of the first stretch is not sustained. The pacing becomes strained and the gags become repetitive. By the time Happy intended to say “Ek ladki ki jaan khatre mein thi”, and instead said “Ek lakdi ki jaan katori mein thi”, I was no longer laughing. This is a case of a film that must have sounded fantastic on paper, but has been let down by the making. Comedy requires its own kind of staging rhythms, and those are absent. The way the hero-versus-villain climax plays out is utterly unexpected, but it’s not as funny as it sounds inside our heads. Happy Patel, by the end, resembles a stand-up act with a super-strong start that keeps you going even when the air begins to leak out of the show.
