The first was 2017's Shabana, which focused on Taapsee Pannu's character Shabana Kahn. Pandey handed the director's reins to Shvam Nair, and not with the best results.
After a turbulent home life that saw her placed in reform school for killing her abusive father to protect her mother, she crops up on the agency's radar and they keep tabs for her possible recruitment. When a friend of hers is killed but the perpetrators escape justice because of their wealth, spy Ranvir Singh (Manoj Bajpayee makes her an offer: He will help her take vengeance on the killers of her friend if she will join the secret agency he represents.
Shabana's mission of vengeance completed, she begins to train with the spy agency for her first mission, targeting an arms dealer whose last escape from Indian intelligence resulted in the death of the agents that pursued him. She will attempt to get close to him and place him in a setting where he can be arrested or killed, backed up by her future Baby team members Om Prakesh Shukla (Anupam Kher) and Ajay Singh Rajput (Akshay Kumar).
Pannu makes a good action heroine, training heavily in mixed-martial arts fighting and Krav Maga for her fight scenes. She presents Shabana Khan as a young woman mostly emptied by the losses and violence she's suffered in her short life, animated by a desire for revenge and justice. Only as she begins to trust her team does she show any hints she believes something more in life than these two motives are possible. Manoj Bajpayee hits the right marks as the steely mentor who knows his new recruit must be tested to her limits in order for her to learn just how much she is capable of achieving, and Prithviraj Sukumaran is appropriately cold-blooded and nefarious as the arms-dealing villain.
One of the story's most interesting features mostly hamstrings it -- Ranvir Singh's offer to help Shabana gain vengeance before she joins the agency is certainly a different sequence of events than thrillers often follow but it also brackets a large section of the movie as an "in-between" kind of set piece that keeps us from getting to the eventual training and mission sequence that's the point. That disconnect may have hurt Naam Shabana at the box office and put Pandey's plans for other prequels on hold. Pannu is effective as both a talented actress and a butt-kicking heroine, but Pandey's convoluted storyline and extraneous moving parts keep her on the shelf for too much of the movie, even when she's front and center on the screen.
One of the story's most interesting features mostly hamstrings it -- Ranvir Singh's offer to help Shabana gain vengeance before she joins the agency is certainly a different sequence of events than thrillers often follow but it also brackets a large section of the movie as an "in-between" kind of set piece that keeps us from getting to the eventual training and mission sequence that's the point. That disconnect may have hurt Naam Shabana at the box office and put Pandey's plans for other prequels on hold. Pannu is effective as both a talented actress and a butt-kicking heroine, but Pandey's convoluted storyline and extraneous moving parts keep her on the shelf for too much of the movie, even when she's front and center on the screen.
Naam Shabana is a Bollywood movie and one of the song sequences best illustrates what Pandey and Nair may have been trying to do -- the ubiquitous training montage is set to the contemplative tune "Zinda" as a way of trying to mix together the dual impulses driving Shabana herself. Violence for vengeance and protection is no problem for her, but it still provides her no peace. The dichotomy of fighting and physical effort shown over the reflective vocals of Sunidi Chauhan makes a contrasting blend that works for the length of the song. But Nair can't make it work for the whole movie, leaving the effective acting from Pannu and her well-done punch-and-kick sequences adrift without the context they should have.
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