2 Stars (out of 4)
Watch Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos on Netflix
Comedian and actor Vir Das’s maiden directorial venture Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos (“Happy Patel: Dangerous Spy“) is underdone. Even with directorial assistance from Kavi Shastri and a screenwriting co-credit for Amogh Randive, this movie about a wannabe spy with deadly culinary skills needs more seasoning.
Das stars as the titular Happy Patel. The movie opens when he is a small child in India. His mother works as a maid for two white British spies — Roger Smith (Andrew Sloman) and Sebastian Paisley (Simon Feilder) — who also happen to be a gay couple. When Happy’s mom is accidentally killed in a shootout between the spies and Goan mafia don Jimmy Mario (Aamir Khan), the Brits take Happy back to England and raise him as their son.
The men never tell Happy about his origins. He doesn’t even know that he’s Indian. Happy wants to be a spy like his dads, but he’s more adept at cooking and ballet than espionage. However, he gets the chance to prove himself when MI7 director Kenneth Mole (Benedict Garrett) sends Happy to Goa to rescue a British scientist who’s been kidnapped and forced to work at a company that makes fairness cream.
But this isn’t a routine mission. Mole has some sort of connection to the owner of the fairness cream company: a donna named Mama (Mona Singh) who is the daughter of Jimmy Mario, who also died in the shootout that killed Happy’s mom. This is all a plan for Mama to take revenge on the son of her father’s killers.
I’m vague about the connection between Mole and Mama because I don’t really understand it. That subplot is used to make reference to British colonialism and whiteness, but it feels shoehorned into the story. I suspect the filmmaking team had a fully-formed subplot in mind, but it doesn’t translate to the screen. That’s a persistent problem in the film, unfortunately.
Happy gets to the town of Panjor in Goa and stays in the same house where his dads lived and his mother was killed, but he doesn’t learn a single thing about his mom while he’s there. It’s a weird omission. His local contacts are a teenage wiz kid named Roxy (Srushti Tawade) and a strange guy named Geet (Sharib Hashmi).
Soon after he arrives, Happy falls for Panjor’s best dancer, Rupa (Mithila Palkar). When Rupa is introduced with that label, we know one of two things: she’s either going to be a great dancer or a terrible dancer. Even with only two options, the answer is still a surprise. Rupa is terrible, and her dancing is the funniest part of the whole movie.
That’s not just because of the way Palkar depicts Rupa’s dancing deficiencies (though she deserves a lot of credit for hilarious execution). It’s because this is one of the few surprising moments in the film. Surprise is arguably even more important to comedies that it is to horror movies, but there’s very little of it in Happy Patel. Not in the way jokes are setup, how shots are edited, or in the way the plot unfolds.
As a result, Happy Patel is more amusing than it is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s nothing like the obvious sources of inspiration for a spy comedy: the Austin Powers movies and Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun films, which are loaded with jokes. Happy Patel relies on wordplay humor that either doesn’t translate from Hindi to English or just isn’t that funny. Imran Khan’s cameo is a baffling letdown.
It’s a shame since Palkar and Singh make the most of the material they’re given. The film deserves a ton of credit for putting so many women in plot-critical roles. The whole town of Panjor could’ve been a character in its own right, had it been more fully developed. As it is, Happy Patel feels more like a Saturday Night Live sketch with a decent skit premise that isn’t robust enough to warrant a feature-length film.
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