Spy In The House:
The idea is full of potential– harried homemaker, juggling the demands of husband, child and in-laws, is actually an undercover special forces agent.
Why she was placed there is never explained; why she was abandoned without communication or salary is vaguely mentioned, which would make a citizen worry about the state of intelligence gathering and law enforcement in the country.
Anushree Mehta’s film, Mrs Undercover, is not particularly concerned about the whys and hows of the situation. It unleashes a skittish Durga (Radhika Apte) on the screen, suddenly forced to take up a mission to catch a serial killer called Common Man (Sumeet Vyas), who murders strong and independent women, in brutal ways. (Soon after the opening scene, he drives a car over a successful lawyer several times and then calmly smokes a cigarette.)
His patriarchal ideas match those of Durga’s husband Deb (Saheb Chatterjee), who repeatedly calls her “just a housewife” and treats her like a serf. Why she puts up with him is not explained either!
Special Forces chief Rangeela (Rajesh Sharma) accosts her in different disguises to drag her back to the field. The Kolkata cops are supposedly incapable of investigating the murders, and neither is Rangeela’s team– they need a rusty secret agent to do simple surveillance jobs. Logic is obviously not the film’s strong point, unfortunately, neither is humour, or thrill.
Durga, modeling a range of lovely sarees tries to do the job as best as she can, and after a long time musters up the nerve to tell off her cheating husband in the middle of a car chase.
Common Man aka Ajay works with a team, presumably of loser incels, including moles in the Special Force, that leads him to wipe out all the agents in the city, except Durga, because she is ‘just a simple housewife’ — the phrase used ad nauseum, so that it can be clumsily debunked in the cartoonish climax.
Picking bits and bobs from films like Raazi, Kahaani and dozens of Hollywood movies about hidden assets, Mrs Undercover is stymied by its juvenile script and slapdash execution. Radhika Apte gets the silliness of the plot and plays Durga with much eye-rolling. It is, however, difficult to salvage this dud.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
