Agent review: Mammootty and Akhil Akkineni’s spy thriller is a trainwreck

Akhil Akkineni plays Ramakrishna aka Ricky, a hacker, in 'Agent'. (Screen grab)

Agent, directed by Surender Reddy, is based on the idea that there are no accidents and that everything is incidental. It sounds clever, doesn’t it? It has a nice ring to it and it sounds like it must be true. Something like the butterfly effect. But the longer you watch Agent, the more convinced you become about the reality of accidents because this one’s a trainwreck.

Reddy’s spy thriller revolves around a RAW agent named Mahadev (Mammootty) who works in a VFX-generated RAW building. Mahadev is also known as ‘The Devil’ because he doesn’t care about his agents falling dead like flies as long as the bad people are killed. To be clear, we’re meant to view him as a hero, not a deranged psychopath.

Heavily borrowing from the Yash Raj Films spy universe, Agent has all the stock characters but makes a mockery of the material. Akhil Akkineni plays Ramakrishna aka Ricky, a hacker, and he seems like a messed-up guy with an overbearing father. That the father is played by Murali Sharma who did such an excellent job as the sourpuss dad in Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo (2020) immediately offers hope.

Also read: Dino Morea on why ‘Agent’ was the right choice for his Telugu cinema debut

But quickly, the film turns Akkineni into a manic bunny who screams, dances and sprays bullets on screen like nobody’s business. He’s supposed to be like The Mask or the Joker, but the character is so badly written that Akkineni’s earnestness becomes grating. To make matters worse, Mahadev repeatedly refers to him as a monkey. Fair warning that this movie is, in fact, a circus.

Dino Morea is pitted against ‘The Devil’ and he’s therefore known as ‘The God’. He’s the rogue agent from the YRF universe but though he has a sob story, he doesn’t take off his shirt. The God runs The Syndicate (when the film is called Agent, you should understand that the makers don’t spend too much time thinking of creative names) that is capable of toppling governments across the world. But The God actually has the emotional bandwidth of a five-year-old because all he wants is for Mahadev to tell him that he’s the best. If Reddy ever makes a sequel, it could be about The God wanting a star from Mahadev in his notebook.

Dino Morea plays the rogue agent, ‘The God’.

In this vapid thriller, there also exists a romance. Sakshi Vaidya is an aspiring pilot, and I was impressed to tell you the truth. Most heroines don’t have a job, and here was one who was going to be a pilot! But that plane is hijacked well before take-off because Vaidya gets stuck in a tiring sexual assault plot thread only so Akkineni can flex some muscles and whip his hair around. It’s not just the lack of originality, it’s also how these scenes are staged without an iota of conviction. It almost feels like the plot was made up as they went along, depending on who had turned up on the sets.

Mammootty had a great run last year, with impressive films like Bheeshma Parvam, Rorschach and Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam. This year, though, the superstar starred in the disappointing Christopher, and Agent is yet another film that wastes his talent. Still, when Mammootty is speaking and Akkineni is reacting, you see an acting masterclass on what to do and what not to do. The superstar is self-contained, doing just what is necessary while Akkineni’s lack of assurance is glaringly obvious.

Mammootty in Agent. (Screen grab)

The film feels interminably long, and the terrible song placements only make it worse. But nothing compares to the final action set piece that goes on and on like a mega serial. It involves missiles going off like Diwali rockets in the sky – that’s all I’ll tell you. Is it, in fact, called Agent because you can feel yourself age through the climax?

When the film began post-interval with the health warnings about tobacco and alcohol being injurious to health, the man next to me added under his breath that this film was injurious to health too. Was this effect on the audience incidental or was it an accident? Whichever it was, I certainly felt like a truck had run over me by the time it was over.