Director
Neeraj Pandey’s films are a mixture of old school Bollywood formula, slick modern execution and bouts of intense suspense with some bombastic, social commentary. His films don’t have clueless idiots with walkie talkies pretending to be commandoes. They have reasonably realistic depiction of police work and ludicrous ‘holy cow that was awesome’ thrills.
His latest venture Baby is another perfectly outlandish and white-knuckled action thriller - a seemingly intelligent but mindless piece of well-oiled escapism that delivers several crowd-pleasing moments of action mayhem. And Pandey does it in such style and a breakneck pace that one can't help but enjoy the ride. Sure, most of the plot points in Babycome dangerously close to the utter stupidity found in films like Holiday, but it’s very entertaining. It’s also a rare piece of event cinema - because how many Akshay Kumar movies turn out to be anything besides awful?
Baby is supposedly based on real life missions and characters, but the disclaimer before the movie mentions that all characters and events in the film are fictitious. This is probably Pandey pulling the prank that the Coen brothers did in Fargo, but more on that later.
We’re brought up to speed with the help of a grave and grim voiceover by Danny Denzongpa who plays Feroze Ali Khan, the chief of a super-secret-undercover-counter-intelligence-rapid-action-surveillance-savvy-first encounter-assault recon-I-spy-antiterrorist unit named
Baby. Feroze tells us that
Baby has been the most successful force against Pakistan-based terrorism, and since 2008, has dismantled several terrorist attacks in India. The film chronicles Baby’s final mission, starring
Akshay Kumar as Ajay who’s hunting down Kay Kay Menon’s Bilal Khan, an escaped terrorist. Ajay’s hunt for Bilal takes him (and us) through seedy streets in Bombay, the bylanes of Turkey, the mountains of Nepal, and the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. Also in the mix is a nutty, India-bashing, hate-spewing Mullah Maulana Mohammad (played by Pakistani actor Rasheed Naz), a not so subtle derivation of LeT’s Zaki ur Rehman Lakhwi.
Baby ups the body count and delivers the goods when it comes to gritty action, non-stop thrills, mood and style. What mainly works here is the sense of urgency. Our hero sticks to the mission instead of veering out for item numbers and even though he’s larger than life, he remains in a fairly realistic mode. This is a mainstream film, but there is no slow-mo bullet time rubbish. There’s some interesting hand-to-hand combat, and Pandey somehow manages to balance the grittiness and realism balance the masala of commercial films. It’s quite refreshing to see a film that caters to its target audience and at least tries to not insult it.
There’s not a dull moment here, save for one hopelessly horrible song in an equally awful love track (Pandey did the same in Special 26 as well). Thankfully, it’s short and quickly abandoned, so we’re thrown right back into a cocktail of chase scenes, intrigue and espionage.
To fill the rather large 159-minute runtime, there are catchy sequences, but also the unintentional hilarity of head-scratchingly stupid moments that stretch the material beyond the realm of plausibility. For example, Bilal escapes from a police van in broad daylight, in the middle of a completely deserted Marine Drive in south Mumbai, after leisurely shooting three cops and walking away. Anyone who’s been to Mumbai knows that the only time you’d find a deserted main road is during the Rapture.
There’s also a scene where Feroze explains to the minister he reports to how Pakistani terror organisations are breeding homegrown terrorists in India, much to the minister’s shock. One would imagine any minister would be well aware of the most basic security threat to the country.
Akshay Kumar deserves credit for choosing such a project and making it work. He’s got his usual cocksure swagger, his impressive athletic prowess but he manages to restrain himself during the dramatic beats. He even hurls a few one-liners in hilariously passive ways. If only he’d stopped himself from giving into his desire to display his jumping abilities.
Adding some much-welcome layer to a very standard sidekick, Taapsee Pannu is fun as Ajay’s team member. Her violent encounter with a shady businessman (Sushant Singh) makes, very crowd pleasingly, an excellent case for women not needing men to fight for them. Kudos also to Pandey for delivering action scenes that are visually slick, cohesive and don’t give in to the lazy cuts.
A
rewatchable thriller can spark conversations about how unexpected some scenes were, but most of the conversations following
Baby will consist of how true the film actually is. One one hand, we’re expected to simply take everything at face value, assume the anti terrorist unit and the mission in the film are real, but also simultaneously digest the vast amounts of obvious creative liberty. A similar self-contradictory narrative also plagued D Day and Madras Café.
So no matter whether you like the film or not, it’s hard to deem Pandey a thought provoking filmmaker because Babyseems a lot sillier a few hours after you see it. Pandey is a smart, commercial filmmaker though, because Baby basically exists for the singular purpose of filling three hours of your life with slickly-crafted and frequently outlandish thrills. Just like Ajay himself, the movie doesn't stop until its mission is complete. Just plug some cotton in your ears though, the music is loud enough to wake up the dead.
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