Give me ordinary Indian men from embassies getting stuck with their hands in the honeypot over baddies that go ‘Ji janab’ all the time. Neeraj Pandey’s Special Ops the movie has been broken down pretty well as a series for Disney+Hotstar. And when I say pretty well, I mean technically. The usual ‘spend Rs28 crore in search of the sixth terrorist’ and the ghastly ending made the movie indigestible. I still wonder how burning a few photographs and maps could produce so much smoke... But that was in the movie.
The series 1.5, which tells us how Himmat Singh (Kay Kay Menon) became Himmat Singh is way better. The four episodes are packed with action and even though some action seems to be totally copied, or as they say, an homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the overall show is eminently watchable.
Also read: ‘Special Ops 1.5’ creator Neeraj Pandey: “A great story is a natural magnet”
First, the casting. They chose really interesting characters to play the parts of the embassy attache in Colombo, the Navy man in Moscow and corrupt cops like Chautala. Because you know this is a spy story, they keep it simple. These men are flattered by the attention and have to share secrets. Now spy stories written during the cold war and secrets being passed on via a honey trap (‘sexpionage’ is a ghastly coinage!) or blackmail is easy to swallow. But Indian government secrets as ‘hot’ property seems rather far fetched. The only story that seems reasonable is when a woman politician knows that the party in power is snooping on her son…
But the story belongs to Himmat Singh. Kay Kay Menon in his younger avatar is super convincing as a maverick company man who will not give up until he has solved the riddle or put pieces of a puzzle together. This time he’s searching for Maninder who seems to have betrayed the country and is helping the big baddie lay honey traps around the world. I did laugh when they explained ‘Chaudhary ka record 100% hai’. Nice business!
The format is tried and tested. Thomson and Thompson (Dupont et Dupond) aka Bannerji and Chadha question Abbas Sheikh about Himmat Singh. Sheikh spins the story and the two get involved with the story (like us) and when they’re done, we too realise that some parts will make you want to reach out for Saridon (Bannerji keeps asking for Crocin), but others will make you say, ‘Shabaash, Himmat Singh!’
Kali Prasad Mukherjee (Bannerji ) and Parmeet Sethi (Chadha) are a fun duo. At first, they are all bluster and officiousness, waiting to reach that gotcha moment, but in the end, they’re commiserating at the losses and cheering the wins. It’s a great storytelling device. The storyteller this time is Vinay Pathak who plays Abbas Sheikh really well. My favourite scene is when he spots Himmat Singh in Kashmir in a TV news clip and his face just lights up. Well done!
Aftab Shivdasani and Kay Kay Menon play out the Jai and Veeru friendship trope rather nicely. Buddy cops that share a history and are friends is a good thing. Gautami Kapoor has a very small role in the set up and she is a sweet addition in a show where all the women seem to be fighters and seductresses.
The anti-ageing thing done to the actors, because it’s a backstory, seems unnatural at first, but one gets used to it. The action sequences in the tank factory (more like tank recycling), and all scenes with Maninder are really cool, especially the handbag strap fight. My only problem is with the sequence where Maninder takes that flight to Dubai; it is so blatantly lifted from the Arnie movie Commando.
Four episodes later, I’m happy. The promise of season two with Farooq in Kathmandu looks good too. With Indian content on OTT platforms content to rehash politics in small UP towns, gangsters wanting more power and money, or just banal love stories, this kind of storytelling is a good weekend watch.
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