D-Day [dir. Nikhil Advani]

D-Day is the first Nikhil Advani directorial I have sat through. You can't blame me, not fter having burnt my eyes with the crapfest that was Kal Ho Na Ho. Most of his features seemed to be built around the YRF/KJo style and D-Day was never in my horizon at the time it released in cinemas. But now that I've seen it, I find it actually a decent thriller, with some significant flaws.

The film is a fictional account of how covert Indian intelligence tries to secretly abduct a Dawood Ibrahim namesake hiding in Pakistan and conducting illegal operations in India. Now, the interesting story is that at some point before this movie came out, a writer friend called Shatrujeet Nath was shopping the idea of a thriller film / series about extracting Dawood from Pakistan. He had multiple discussions with various industry people, but couldn't get a deal going. It is quite likely that the idea germinated independently with both parties and each takes a different route with that idea, but it's an interesting coincidence. Anyhoo, Shatru did write up his idea as a pretty good thriller novel called The Karachi Deception (originally published in 2013, a few months before D Day's release) and is now more famous as the author of a multi-volume Indian fantasy series called Vikramaditya Veergatha that draws from mythology to present an action packed saga about king Vikramaditya taking on both the Devas and the Asuras in an all-out war to prevent either of them from taking control of the Halahala poison. I've read the first two installments, which were great fun; waiting for the fourth and last book to come out, so that I can go back and finish the series in one go.

Anyhoo, back to Kara..., er, D-Day. It begins with a slickly mounted covert attack where our heroes make their move on the big D (he's called Iqbal / Goldman here, but let's dispense with these allusions). At a cliffhanger point during this assault, the screenplay takes a big leap back to the where it all started. Irrfan Khan plays Indian agent Wali Khan based in Pak since 9 years, waiting for such an opportunity. In this time he even has a Paki family, a wife and child who have no idea of his true identity. This is a wonderful change from the usual depiction of spies as cooler-than-thou James Bond wannabes. When Wali learns that D (Rishi Kapoor, flamboyantly villainous) is going to be personally present at his son's wedding, he signals his superior in India (Nasser) to initiate the extraction mission.

India sends in a Dirty Crew to do the deed, including a RAW agent (Huma Qureshi), a criminal (Aakash Dahiya) and a suspended army officer (Arjun "Kitply" Rampal). This is where D-Day's divided priorities begin to be apparent. On one hand, it wants to be a gritty, realistic thriller, paying great attention to how the spies try to close in on their target and set up their mission. On the other, it wants to be a bicep-flexing bombastic actioner where surly-faced Rampal kick-slams people in slow motion. Considering the delicate nature of the operation, why would Intelligence send a hothead renegade that makes a habit of disregarding orders? There's even a pointless romance tacked on for him (Shruti Haasan as a Paki prostitute). The dichotomy is most jarring in the scene where Rampal realizes that his GF has been 'visited' by the villains. Tracking blood-drops from her door to her bedroom, he mentally recreates the scene of her being bashed around to the tune of a romantic ballad. It's a lovely stylized music video - but it belongs to a different film altogether.

The bulk of the film's goodness comes from Irrfan and Rishi. Their scenes together (if you mentally edit out Rampal) are Bollywood at its best - masaledaar and gripping. Qureshi has a couple of good scenes when she is allowed to emote, especially one where she is talking to her fiancee (a voice-only Rajkummar Rao), as does Shriswara as Wali's Paki wife, but these two are the pillars on which the film stands, and when they go out of the picture, it becomes that less interesting.