Code Name: Tiranga is a story about a RAW agent, Durga Singh (Parineeti Chopra), who falls in love with a Turkish man, Ali (Harrdy Sandhu) while on official duty. Omar Khaled (Sharad Kelkar), a terrorist, had attacked the Indian Parliament 20 years ago, and Durga is sent to kill him. That is when she meets Ali and the confusion begins. Here are my honest thoughts about the film.
1. This film feels like the lovechild of Raazi and Ek Tha Tiger. Durga is a RAW agent, just like Salman Khan in Ek Tha Tiger. Her mission involves getting married to Ali in order to further her covert operation. Just like Raazi. Eventually, she falls in love with him and even risks her own life to save him and be with him. Just like the two movies.
2. When I first started the movie, I thought Aparshakti Khurrana was the male lead before finding out it was actually singer Harrdy Sandhu. Don’t judge me for this assumption, Bollywood is full of people with this full beard, sharp features, and dark hair look, so much so that they’ve all started looking the same! Don’t believe me?
Harrdy Sandhu, Ayushmann Khurrana, and Aparshakti Khurrana. Can you tell them apart?
(Photo Courtesy: Twitter)
3. Durga has to kill her boss, Bakshi, after finding out that he is the mole within RAW. She chases him down after fighting a bunch of goons, and when she finally reaches him, he is in a basement. Before she is about to kill him, she is shot twice by another man trying to protect Bakshi.
4. Wounded, she decides to use the final trick up her sleeve: a bomb. She removes the safety pin from the hand grenade and it blasts. Durga walks out of the basement with smoke behind her. I am so confused. Are you trying to tell me she survived a bomb blast in a closed basement and came out on her two feet with just a few blisters and coughs? To add to my shock, Durga comes out of this place and drives a car! I, on the other hand, cannot stop whining and wailing even if my pinky toe bumps into the edge of my bed. This movie is unhinged.
5. Harrdy Sandhu literally has 4 lines in the whole movie. And one of them is a song. Badi nainsaafi!
6. Okay so turns out, she didn't actually use the grenade. She put the pin back in and decided not to kill Bakshi. So, where did the smoke come from? This movie is literally changing its story according to its convenience.
7. Code Name: Tiranga makes the cardinal mistake of spoonfeeding its plot to the viewer through a cheat character. They conveniently make a senior officer at RAW the actual mole. After they entrap him, Durga narrates the whole story of how he actually fooled all of them into believing who the mole was. So basically, she does a 10-minute monologue, where she is explaining how the agent tricked them. Who is she explaining this to? The agent himself! Sis, he already knows what he did! What’s the point of this thing? Clearly, this is only a convenient scene to fill in the gaps for the viewer. In fact, none of my confusion has been cleared after this monologue, so you took a bad scene, and made it even worse!
8. There is a scene before the climax where Durga fights with a bunch of henchmen who are protecting Omar. She does this with a single pistol against at least 20 men who are armed with rifles and automatic weapons. That isn’t the craziest part. The whole sequence is shot from a first-person POV, like in a video game. This includes the punches, kicks, and other fight scenes too– all from the same POV. So basically, you will feel like you are playing counter strike, the only difference is that this shooter (Durga) has manicured nails.
Are you playing counter strike or watching a Bollywood film? You'll never know.
9. In another scene, she has to figure out the route to a destination. She has been to this place before, but she was taken there while she was blindfolded. But this is not even an issue for Durga. All she does is blindfold herself again, and through morse code, by recognizing the sounds of the mosque or the train that she had heard the last time, she instructs the driver to reach the place again. I was impressed! I’d suggest making Durga an app; I’d definitely use her instead of Google Maps!
10. All in all, Code Name: Tiranga is described as an action and thriller film, but sadly, it has neither.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)