Tag Archives: James Bond

Agent Vinod: Agent of All Kinds

The problem with Agent Vinod is a sad one indeed. Because this was one Bollywood movie that I had seen in a long, long time that really showed a lot of promise. And therefore, the end it came to makes it all the more sad.

Sriram Raghavan has been one of the high toasted directors that the Bollywood New Wave has produced and propped up in recent times. And with movies like Ek Hasina Thhi and Johnny Gaddar, the accolades that he had received till date were truly justified. And therefore also, equally justified, was the hype around his latest cinemascope, Agent Vinod. And with Agent Vinod, he was once again teaming up with Saif Ali Khan — no one really has still come to grips with the fist fight scene from Ek Hasina Thhi. It’s true.

Bottom Line: Agent Vinod did not do as well as expected at the box office.

After having watched Agent Vinod twice, I think I can take a shot at the cause — amalgamation of genres. That alone could have been the only reason why the movie couldn’t be well received by the audiences.

With Ek Hasina Thhi, Sriram Raghavan took us on a seldom walked path, that of the noir thriller genre. And everything in that movie fit like the perfect shoe. Like I already mentioned, the fist fight sequence, the actual act, the boyfriend bait, the betrayal, the friendships, the metamorphosis, the strategy, the trap and the redemption, everything seemed to just come on like a sequential train already pre-destined by fate.

Johnny Gaddar travelled a different path completely. We were now back to the retro thriller, made even more emphatic by the director in the two people he dedicates the movie to — James Hadley Chase and Vijay Anand. The key word here was “style”. Once again, everything ran through like a well-wound clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock, that I believe has been the key to all of Sriram Raghavan’s movies.

And boom! Face to face with Agent Vinod. What bitter disappointment. And why? Because Sriram Raghavan has gone down the same path that he had rightfully chosen to avoid earlier. He had attempted to make a blockbuster, Bollywood ishtyle!

Catastrophe!

Let me illustrate my point better with an example from the first few minutes of the movie. We are shown a Tuco quote from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and then the movie starts to play. We are all excited and waiting, when what seems like an almost straight life from Once Upon a Time in the West starts materializing in the background — the harmonica is quite the same, but the movement far too laborious, unlike the magnificent original. And then from there, we are taken right into a Pierce Brosnan-ish James Bond film where the Pakistanis try to make Saif Ali Khan (name unknown) talk. And then, moments later, when Saif tries to make a break for it, along with his “partner” Ravi Kishen, starts the meaningless banter between the two, ala Main Hoon Na style. And finally, borrowing from the theater of the absurd (and I am being as polite and sarcastic that I can possibly be at the same time), a sexy woman tossing inside a sack is uncovered — her name? Farah Faquesh. (I may have gotten her first name wrong, but then… do you blame me?)

And now rolls the credit titles.

This I believe is the principal problem with Agent Vinod, and it is sad to see Sriram Raghavan go down this road. The same held true for Anurag Basu earlier, who met with the same fate with Kites. But I have noticed that whenever such directors go on a budget spree, they start to lose focus. Perhaps they become to ridden with the guilt that they need to get the producer back all their money and start including item numbers which make no sense — Sriram Raghavan’s sheer genius is evident from the action sequences he develops through bits and portions of the movie. Bourne Supremacy be damned, Agent Vinod is a clear winner.

This wasn’t a review exactly, but more of an inquisition into the causes of Agent Vinod’s failure. But give it some thought, and do let me know if I missed out more than just this.

Directed by: Sriram Raghavan

Produced by: Saif Ali Khan, Dinesh Vijan

Screenplay by: Sriram Raghavan and Arijit Biswas

Starring: Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Ram Kapoor, Maryam Zakaria, Gulshan Grover, Ravi Kishen

Music by: Pritam

Cinematography by: C K Muraleedharan

Editing by: Puja Ladha Surti

Running Time: 152 minutes (approx)

Budget: $11.97 million (approx)

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The Non-Bond Bonds: Part I

Truth be told, he is a man’s man. Every childish dream every boy has ever had, and in most cases at an age when none of them had even any inkling of who he was, neither from the movies, and least of all from the novels – but all through childhood, through adolescence and also through a major part of adult life, every boy has desired to grow up into James Bond. Why, what, when and other such questions to this regard cannot be entertained to ascertain the root cause of the whole ephemera, because frankly, no one knows them till date. Its a mystery even the great man himself cannot solve. And it was not the actors, it was the character himself – a feat seldom repeated through history.

When I was “old” enough to see the first James Bond movie, I was around, what, 12 years old. And I had bought black tickets to see what the whole cacophony was all about. Luckily, it was still the age of single-screen theaters and in my part of town, no one cared who you were. So much so, when I had asked the black ticketeer whether I would be stopped because of the “A” certificate, he reassured me that it was for the action scenes. I was like, “Bully for them… Gulshan Kumar got shot in the middle of the road some hundred years back man… Get a life!” And so consequently, Pierce Brosnan became the first face of the enigma that was James Bond for me. And f***, did he have style! It was like watching style ooze out of every dolby stereo in the hall. The screen was like a trance. Body language was, as I started calling it thereforth, “body English”. Yes, the black ticketeer had no idea that Bond’s opening scene saw him curling on white sheets with what was presumed to be his Latin teacher at Oxford, learning along with doing stuff. “Now that’s the way to do it,” I thought… “That’s why he’s James Bond!” All my teachers were well over their menopause, so the fantasy remained with Bond.

But the point that I was going to make was that Tomorrow Never Dies set the whole wheel in motion for me regarding James Bond. Well, at least the films. Given, that at that point, I thought that the rest was all balderdash and there possibly could never be anyone other than Pierce Brosnan to play Bond (fact remains that I did not even know his name then), but still, I pestered my father to tell me the whole history of the Bond franchise. And I found out that there were some other actors too who had played Bond. Dad was swearing by some Sean Connery (the old man with a white beard in The Rock as I would place him), and also mentioned some XYZ, a one-film Bond and the other big weight being a certain Roger Moore. According to my father, there could have been one more.

Therefore, from there, I did the mental math, something that I never got right during the exams. 2 + 2 told me that Sean Connery it seams was some big actor who had been a decent Bond. Ditto for Roger Moore. And then there were two more bums in the equation before the real champ (i.e. Brosnan) came onto the scene. So now that my basic thirst for the Bond dossier had been satisfied, I got back to doing the mental math that was necessary for me to pass exams.

Several years later, after a spriteful series of Bond movies (all starring Pierce Brosnan), I was browsing along a DVD shop and came across a movie that I had heard off for quite some time, a movie called Dr No. Alright, the first Bond. I needed to see this.

 

Pierce Brosnan was no longer the only Bond. He was no longer Bond in my books. There was the one and only, there was just James Bond. And his name, is Sir Sean Connery.

He was everything that we had always pictured Bond to be. Sure, Brosnan was good, he was better than good, he was excellent — but Sean Connery was the mental picture. He had that boisterous smile, that Godlike appearance, that suave charisma, the very panache that a Bond character needed to have. James Bond seemed to have been written with Sean Connery in mind. (That is indeed true — when Sean Connery was first hired to play James Bond, Ian Fleming, the author, had remarked that he didn’t want an overgrown stuntman to play Bond. However, on seeing the first run of Dr No, Fleming was so overjoyed with Connery’s Bond, that he promptly added a Scottish background to Bond in his novels.)

 After a successful rendition of four Bond movies — Dr No, From Russia WIth Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball and You Live Only Twice, Sean Connery  moved on from the Bond franchise. And George Lazenby was hired to play Bond. To impress upon the producers that he could indeed come off as Sean  Connery (yes, Bond was Sean Connery), he rented a tux and knocked out one of his co-actors during the auditions, with a mere punch.

Now, here comes the fun fact. George Lazenby, in his Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, played  a different kind of Bond. Sure, the style was  there, the appearance was there, the mannerisms were all intact — but there was something else that was brought into the character, which had earlier  been missing. The Human Touch. Point under consideration refers to a particular scene, where Bond is running from being a captive of Blofeld, his arch-nemesis. As his Blofeld’s henchmen chase after Bond,  for the first time in a Bond movie, we see a unconfident Bond, a Bond who is literally scared of being caught and killed. He doesn’t already hold that look of knowing that he would cheat death.

 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service shows us a James Bond we can all identify with. This was also the first James Bond movie that was made as per the novel, to the letter T wherever possible. And this was also  the most critically appreciated Bond film.

It was a commercial DUD!

After all, the James Bond franchise reached one and all through the movies and the movies alone. Not through a print medium. No one cared about the books. Sean Connery had already written out the James  Bond that people fell in love with, all over the world, at every theater which played Bond films. George Lazenby played the price for trying to be true to the letter and spirit of the novel. And he played the price  for it, since here he would have to play to the letter and spirit of a Dr No, or say a Goldfinger.

George Lazenby, who had really played the “true” James Bond was a complete washout, lost forever into oblivion. The first, and original, Non-Bond James Bond!

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