From the Rental Vault: Agent Vinod (2012)

Bollywood spy movies have to walk a fine line. On the one hand, the audience expects song and dance numbers -- it's why they're watching a Bollywood flick to begin with. Song and dance numbers can make a movie a little on the silly side, because in real life people don't start singing and dancing. Many musicals embrace this and just go for the silly; others will settle for being stories that use the musical numbers to create a mood and may feature other narrative aspects that people understand are not true to real life.

The espionage business, as shown in movies, are replete with such aspects. Even when they don't incorporate science-fiction elements they show spies who are so high profile it's pretty much impossible to believe that everyone doesn't know who they are as soon as they show up. So a spy movie with musical numbers can in fact work, as long as it doesn't tilt too far one way or the other. Unfortunately the 2012 release Agent Vinod makes the mistake of thinking that matching an excess one way with an excess the other way as a way of walking the tightrope. It turns out not to be.

Vinod (Saif Ali Khan) is put onto the trail of Russian criminals who murdered a colleague after he had learned just a few introductory facts about their planned operation. Armed only with the clue "242," he takes the place of a courier and gets into the orbit of a Tangiers criminal boss who may be ready to sell abandoned nuclear arms. The crime boss's personal physician, Ruby Mendes (Kareena Kapoor) is quite obviously more than she seems, but Vinod doesn't know for which side. Burrowing in more deeply, he finds rogue elements in India's rival, Pakistan, may be trying to acquire the nuke in order to set it off in an Indian city. Only that may not be the end of the conspiracy, and Vinod may wind up with only himself to trust.

Director/co-writer Sriram Raghavan keeps his action sequences taut and compact and doesn't waste too much time trying to make Agent Vinod's squirrelly convoluted plot make any more sense than it has to in the moment. Saif Ali Khan makes a suave and sophisticated leading man who sells the familiar idea of the roguish charmer spy fairly well, but Kapoor is not as well served by the part of Ruby Mendes. With a couple dozen-plus roles in her filmography, she's one of India's most versatile female stars -- but the Mendes role is too flat to let her do much with it beyond some hinted comedy and action of her own. And even though Kapoor and Khan would marry the same year the movie came out, Raghavan and co-writer Arjit Biswas can't bring much of a spark to their onscreen interaction.

Song-wise, "I'll Do the Talking Tonight" is a good macho-bravado tone-setter for the steely-eyed Vinod, adding some Russian-influenced instrumentation to its dance-floor thump."Raabta," a romantic piano ballad played as Vinod and Ruby face down a John Wick-styled hit squad, is an interesting contrast of music and onscreen events.

Vinod was co-produced by Saif Ali Khan and probably intended as a franchise kickoff. But pre-release problems, political missteps and a plagiarism lawsuit added up to a strong box-office headwind that the movie's undecided personality and uninspired execution couldn't sail against.