A well-trained Pakistani spy sent on a mission to destabilise India post-Operation Sindoor suffers a grievous head injury. He loses his memory. His bosses in Rawalpindi go into a tizzy, his accomplices in India are caught in a bind and the film about an amnesiac secret agent’s erratic exploits flies off on a merry but uneven tangent.
What’s not to like in this harmless cockeyed concoction, one might ask. A lot because the arrow that Udta Teer refers has a rather blunt head that knows not where it is headed?
There is a great deal in Udta Teer that keeps spiralling out of control as the film makes its way through an exercise that harks back in spirit, but certainly not in substance, to the Hollywood spy parodies that Mel Brooks and Mike Myers powered many decades ago with considerable commercial success.
Udta Teer, which plunges headlong into the bedlam sparked by the spy who remembers nothing and switches sides to begin a manhunt for ‘himself’, follows suit, thrives on fishing in troubled waters and lets unbridled banality run riot.
Housefull 4 and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 and 3 writer Akash A Kaushik’s first stab at film direction, Udta Teer misses its mark by a fair distance. It descends into chaos in more ways than one and never comes close to finding a way out.
In the era of Dhurandhar, Udta Teer aspires to be Austin Powers. That is a big ask for a movie that treats a genre as a plaything that it has little control over.
The film does have dashes of inspired lunacy and, just as importantly, the presence of the ever-reliable Ayushmaan Khurrana to keep it afloat when its unmitigated vacuity threatens to derail the comic carousel and undermine the quirkiness of the premise.
To strengthen his cover in India, the Pakistani spy, Bilal Ahmed alias Vikrant Thapar (Khurana), has a wife, Yamini (Sara Ali Khan), and a mother-in-law (Supriya Pilgaonkar), who is worried stiff that her daughter’s marriage is on the brink of collapse.
Yamini works in the finance department of the Indian defence ministry, which makes her an unsuspecting asset for the ISI agent who doubles up as her husband until the man forgets who he is.
Khurrana and his co-actors, most of them seasoned performers, know what they have signed up for. They never stop going with the flow.
Especially noteworthy is the performance by Mukul Dev in his final screen appearance. He plays a bumbling, rambunctious terrorist charged with planning fidayeen attacks that always seem more likely to boomerang on him.
Kicking off as a straightforward espionage thriller, Udta Teer changes tack when the Pakistani spy loses his sense of where he has come from and where he should be going. The muddle in the messed-up man’s mind rubs off on the film and not always in a good way.
One person asks Bilal who now believes that he is Vikrant: Aap toh Hindu ho, Urdu kaise padh rahe ho? Seriously? The aside (inserted as an identity marker) smacks of monumental ignorance of the language, if not outright prejudice. Not funny at all!
The film’s writer-director knows only marginally better than the film’s loose-cannon hero what the dynamics of the game that he is trying his hand at are. He upends the rules of the genre and crafts a spoof that isn’t as spiffy as it should be. Udta Teer has way too many missteps, and yet keeps moving at an even keel.
While that may not be enough to send the movie soaring into the stratosphere, it just about suffices to keep Udta Teer flying at a reasonable height and pace in search of a meaningful target.
The goal moves further and further away as the rigmarole unfolds but the flight of the arrow does not stop until the hurly-burly is done.
Udta Teer turns the espionage actioner on its head and runs with whatever is generated in the process. The idea is to see the funnier side of a serious business and extract mirth from it.
But the Dharma Productions and Sikhya Entertainment-produced film runs into many a challenge on the way. Take the slapdash ways of a film about a mission gone wrong in your stride and you might find moments in the film that are actually amusing, if only mildly so in the main.
The secret agent from across the border sneaks into India with a clear brief and then clean forgets the salient details of the job that he has been entrusted with. He begins to imagine himself as an Indian counter-terrorism operative determined to prove his worth.
His nonplussed bosses, General Mir (Gulshan Grover) and his immediate superior Niyazi (Ram Kapoor) go into full-on damage control mode but Bilal proves to be an arrow that can no longer be shoved back into the quiver.
Khurrana, whose career is dotted with screen roles designed for flowing against the tide, sinks into the skin of a man who is the very antithesis of a big-screen secret agent. As a man who cannot tell the difference between the real and the imagined, he delivers a performance that holds the film together.
As for Sara Ali Khan, the role she plays is secondary in nature. Yamini is conceived as an appendage. That is all she is allowed to be.
Gulshan Grover and Ram Kapoor, playing Pakistani army men fighting a losing battle, pump up the comic energy with their pronounced awareness of what is required of them in a film that goes all out with its madcap plot.
The cast has several other actors who make a mark. Suhail Nayyar as Bilal’s compatriot who has infiltrated India’s counter-terrorist outfit and is hard pressed to fathom his mate’s unpredictable actions, and Smita Tambe and Rahul Bose as senior officials of the spy agency that Bilal has worked his way into do their best within the limited opportunities that they have.
Udta Teer is diverting all right but one thing it certainly does not yield is the kind of hilarity that will have you rolling in the aisles. But it won’t induce any major eye-rolls either even if it leaves you wondering what the whole point of the film is.
Is that good enough for a film that aspires to take us on a far ride? The answer would be in the affirmative only if one is in a particularly lenient mood. Or else, Udta Teer is only a projectile that strikes nothing.
