Director: Garry BH
Writer: K.Rajashekhar Reddy
Cast: Nikhil Siddartha, Iswarya Menon, Abhinav Gomatam, Jisshu Sengupta
‘This Akhil Akkineni-Surender Reddy is an unbearable collation of spy cliches’ was the headline of my review of Agent. This befits the review of Spy too, but unlike filmmakers, I don’t have the liberty to rehash and churn the same text every time. Spy is an incredibly unoriginal film in which every idea, both micro and macro, predates the independence era, a timeframe the story connects to its main conflict.
There’s a dreaded terrorist on a destruction spree, missions in multiple countries to be thwarted, a nuclear attack to be averted, lives to be saved, a mole within the team to be ratted out, a hero who disobeys his chief’s orders and is labeled a ‘rogue’, phones that need to be hacked, so on and so forth. We have seen it ALL. There isn’t an ounce of novelty here, apart from the connection to real-life history featuring the covert operations of Subhash Chandra Bose, but the way it is executed lacks the gravitas or thrill to compensate for Spy’s creative shortcomings.