Quite early in the film, a team of RAW Agents are on a mission to capture Abdul Saleem who’s the brother of Ibrahim Qureshi, a Dawood-like character, who’s shown to be the mastermind behind several terror attacks in India.
Agent Arjun (Gopichand) and his team enter the building with relative ease, just as any hero would enter a heavily-guarded villain’s mansion in mainstream movies. A surveillance system that relays images back to the RAW headquarters and some emphasis on how Arjun doesn’t go by rule books (most spy heroes don’t follow protocol, do they?) are the only added dimensions to this mission. The sequence gives us an indication to not expect much from the film.
Chanakya packs in a few familiar tropes of spy thrillers. The Agents lead double lives. Arjun is known to most people as Ramakrishna and works at a bank. His team includes four trained agents, played by Aadarsh Balakrishna, Raja Chembolu, and others. Barring Arjun, the others have families to take care of and they share an easy bonhomie.
Nasser plays the RAW chief, Jayaprakash is the home minister and there’s a lot of talk about nabbing Qureshi and his men or thwarting their plans before the next G8 Summit. In between all this, as advised by the vet (Ali), Aishwarya (Mehreen Pirzada) wants to find a mate for her pet dog and pursues the hero because he has a dog of the same breed. He disagrees, she pleads. The bank manager overhears all this and infers it differently. Don’t ask if this banal comedy track adds up in some way to the spy story. At one point, when Mehreen says ‘I am much more mature than you think’, I felt sorry for her.
- Cast: Gopichand, Zareen Khan, Mehreen Pirzada
- Direction: Thiru
The film gets back on track when Sohail (Upen Patel) is introduced as Qureshi’s (Rajesh Khattar) son and his actions put RAW and Arjun on the back foot. Qureshi himself doesn’t come across as ominous. Making him wear red-tinted glasses isn’t enough, some amount of characterisation goes into depicting a strong antagonist.
Watching this film brought back memories of other spy films, particularly director Nikhil Advani’s D-Day . That film was also about red glasses sporting D-Company leader and undercover RAW agents (Nasser was the chief there as well). D-Day had better character arcs for the agents and there was enough emotional heft to make us root for them and their mission.
Chanakya is centred on Gopichand, while Aadarsh and Raja who are both fine actors, are relegated to the sidelines. Many mainstream Telugu films are skewed towards the hero anyway, so that isn’t a major problem. Chanakya’s biggest undoing is its lacklustre narrative that doesn’t build enough tension even in its most crucial moments.
The change of scenario when the story moves to Karachi and the entry of Zareen Khan, who gets a sizeable and important role, perk things up a wee bit. There’s a fleeting semblance of smartness when a character shares a Morse Code at a critical point. But all this is way too little to salvage a middling narrative. Oh, there’s also a romantic duet in between the mission.
Want a smart home-grown spy thriller? Revisit last year’s release, Goodachari . Or for a different dimension of Agents and their lives, there’s also The Family Man web series.
Chanakya had the opportunity to up the game and present something refreshing, but it squanders it away.
