★★★
“Moderately spicy.”
This Indian movie flopped at the local box-office, and comes limping onto Netflix with an IMDb rating of just 3.2. Reviews there are largely scathing, calling it “unrealistic.” Oh, sure: but people bursting into song for elaborate musical numbers – that totally happens in Mumbai. To be clear, I love the likes of RRR. But realism, or anything in that solar system, is pretty low down on the list of reasons I watch Bollywood films. This is… well, serviceable, is what I’d call it. It is too long for the material, at 137 minutes, but again – length goes with the territory, it’s more a question whether the film is capable of filling it adequately. Here, not so much, at least in the second half.
The heroine is Durga Devi Singh (Chopra), an Indian spy whom we first meet honey-trapping Dr. Mirza Ali (Sandhu) in Afghanistan, in order to set a trap for terrorist leader, Khalid Omar (Kelkar). The trap fails, but Durga feels bad at having betrayed Mirza, for whom she has genuine feelings. A subsequent mission sees her sent to kill a captured operative, to prevent him from spilling secrets to the Pakistani intelligence agency. She ends up rescuing him instead, but is hurt in the process, which brings her back into the company of the good doctor. During the rescue attempt, Omar’s wife is also killed, a death for which the terrorist blames Durga, and is now prepared to go to any lengths for revenge on her.
As spy stuff goes, it’s all fairly generic, with other threads such as the presence of a mole inside the Indian spy service. There is not much novel or exciting here, but it is carried out with an adequate degree of skill, and really only one particularly gratuitous song, when Mirza goes all karaoke at a wedding for what seems like half an hour. The camerawork is nicely scope, with a lot of exotic locations, and while Chopra won’t be winning any awards for her action, she functions decently. It’s just pleasing to see a genuine Bollywood action heroine in this genre: things like the YRF Spy Universe are typically so macho, they’re in danger of choking on their own mustaches.
The first half definitely works better, with the plot consistently moving forward. The movie feels, from an action point, that it peaks too early, and then lumbers its way through the final hour, before the inevitable face-off between Durga and Khalid, which goes about as you would expect. Things then continue to run on, as the mole’s identity is revealed, and the story rehashed in flashback to that end. I may have been hunting for snacks in the cupboard by this point. There’s a truly weird sequence where the film inexplicably goes into first-person shooter mode for an extended period, which had me trying to figure out if it was entirely CGI. They likely should not have bothered, yet it’s a rare blatant misstep, in a film which seems to pride itself on aggressively mediocre competence.
Dir: Ribhu Dasgupta
Star: Parineeti Chopra, Harrdy Sandhu, Sharad Kelkar, Rajit Kapur


Or, um, something, I guess. Maya (Dynevor) is at her mother’s funeral, when she gets a surprise, in the appearance of her long estranged father, Sam (Ifans). He wants to reconnect with her, and to this end, offers her a job with his real-estate company in Cairo. Despite qualms, Maya accepts, but not long after her arrival, Sam is kidnapped. To obtain his release, the kidnappers order her to recover a package and deliver it to them. Things turn out to be more complex than that, naturally, and the resulting trail takes Maya first to India, then on to South Korea, with various parties keenly interested in the outcome. She discovers the murky truth about her father’s business activities too.
Well, this is a real roller-coaster ride of style and incompetence. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Chinese film where the subtitles were quite so incomprehensible. Even though this one is on the YouTube channel for an official Chinese streaming service (iQiYi), the soundtrack was entirely muted at some points, and the soundtrack replaced by jaunty elevator musak at others. Despite being a mere sixty-six minutes, the presentation is therefore something of a test of endurance, and I am also not prepared to guarantee the accuracy of the plot synopsis, character names or actors. There was heavy use of Google Translate required, there being no IMDb page for the movie. I did my best.
Right in the middle of us watching this, Chris got a text from our daughter: “I think we rented the wrong version of Ballerina…” Yes, independently, she was watching the same film. The difference is, we understood what we were getting into. We knew this was a mockbuster from infamous purveyor of such things, The Asylum. I thought the concept of people mistaking Asylum movies for the real thing was an urban legend. Courtesy of our daughter, we now know better. Or worse. For this is, of course, not fit to lace up Ballerina‘s shoes, and anyone expecting it will be sorely disappointed. Yet it’s not irredeemable. I’ve seen considerably worse. From The Asylum, in particular.
I quite liked the idea here, but the execution just wasn’t quite good enough to do justice to the concept. It feels like a matter of resources to some degree. But I also feel that a few tweaks to things would have paid significant dividends. The heroine is Tara Croydon (Fox), a CIA agent who experiences a crisis after an operation means she’s not around when her father passes away. In her depression, she signs up for a cutting-edge but rather dubious experimental project under the oversight of Hype (Medina). This involves her being given the ability to transform, physically, into one of fifteen different personas which have been implanted into her.
This is a solid, no-nonsense combination of spy and science-fiction. Though, to be honest, it is skewed towards the former genre, with the latter mostly window-dressing. It wouldn’t take much to change the setting from a solar system whose ownership is disputed by a couple of galactic empires, to a city whose ownership is disputed by a couple of countries. The planet is Hudson, claimed both by the Star Kingdom of Prometheus and the Koratan Confederacy. Heather Kilgore is among the best agents of the Promethean King’s Order, and is dispatched to Hudson after the suspicious death of a man who had betrayed the Kingdom, former commander Connor Monroe
★★★
This was my favourite new television show of 2024, and might have been my pick overall. It’s a very strong mix of action and drama, with a fabulous cast of characters. I think I might have to go back to the first season of
Reed calls in her top assassin, Sam (Whishaw), to protect Helen, fearing she might also be targeted. He has a history with Helen, dating back to before the birth of her children with Wallace. Things spiral out of control, involving the suspicious death of the Chinese ambassador, his missing daughter, a previous hit Sam botched, and Helen’s relentless pursuit of revenge, while trying to keep her family life intact. It’s a lot of balls to keep in the air, but the script does a fine job of avoiding confusion, with the wrap-up proving particularly admirable in its clarity. While I’ve read complaints about it being implausible, I have definitely seen worse. There’s room for both this, and more grounded spy shows like Slow Horses.
Both director Morel and star Beckinsale should be familiar names around here. The former directed
★★★½