Naam Shabana - A Review




With Naam Shabana, the director Neeraj Pandey had a lot to carry on his shoulders. After movies like Special 26 & Baby, one would expect nothing but at least the same amount of creative excellence from the movie-makers. Naam Shabana, unfortunately, does not stand up to the past promises.


The movie revolves around the protagonist Shabana, played by Taapsee Pannu, and her mundane struggles in life which turn her into a stoic woman who has never experienced life sans troubles.


Manoj Bajpayee works for a secret agency & plays the lead for a covert mission undertaken by his mothership. The employees of this agency, by the way, share a close bond and can go to any length to help & support each other. But if they find a random woman in the middle of a deserted road, late at night, being bullied by a group of Hooligans, they’d proudly and unapologetically step back and let the drama unroll, even if they are fully capable of saving the woman just because she doesn’t belong to the same brotherhood cause...bro code, bitch!!


This agency finds something special in Shabana and hires her to track & kill a guy they’ve been unsuccessfully chasing for years. In the middle of this frenzy, Akshay Kumar gives a special appearance to help our damsel in distress and disappears immediately after his work is done...only to come back later in the movie to execute the agency’s master plan to end the villain. Our invincible villain, by the way, keeps changing his face (through plastic surgery) like Manoj Bajpai changes his office wall-paper with the click of a button.


The movie moves at an extremely languid pace with several nonsensical loopholes which leave the audience hunting for some ounce of logic. Taapsee Pannu delivers an average performance & Manoj Bajpayee also fails to impress the viewers. It’s Akshay Kumar who brings a few moments of smile on the viewers’ faces with his unabashed & unapologetic humor, but that too fails to cheer us up for long.


The movie has a terribly weak plot line which has absolutely nothing fresh, let alone engaging to offer. I, for one, left with a headache and a need to cleanse my head with some good dope from Netflix!
I hope this saves at least some of you from going through this 147- min long ordeal. Let’s jump straight to the word of the week now:

Reify: Make (something abstract) more concrete or real

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