London Confidential

I have heard that during the times of world wars, there used to be mediocre and caricaturish anti-Hitler and anti- Soviet movies that got screened in the US to propagate that hate against the enemy. Heavily jingoistic and largely with no elements of freshness, the only intention was to elate the nationalism in everyone. London Confidential, which has a creator credit assigned to its writer Hussain Zaidi, an investigative journalist, feels pretty much like those silly propaganda movies. If anything is good here, it’s Ewan Mulligan’s cinematography which gets wasted in a lamely written spy thriller.

So China is under threat now. Indians have a lead that China is creating a deadly virus that can cause a pandemic. The individual who has shared that data to India is still unknown to both parties because the only Indian who knew about that Chinese individual got killed. So the plot is basically Indians trying to find that individual to protect and expose China and the Chinese trying to kill that individual.

I am not really sure when did the shooting of this movie happen. Because in the initial bits of London Confidential, we can see some people walking on the streets of London with masks on and we hear the voice-over of the leading lady confirming that the story is set in the Corona days.  In a nutshell, this movie is basically India saving the world from another pandemic by exposing China’s plans. I can sense the agenda here, but I wouldn’t have had many complaints if there was something in the filmmaking aspect of the film. Uma, our main protagonist is literally telling us all the script elements as if it was a radio drama. This is one of those films where you might feel whether our intelligence folks are this bad at guessing. Because I was able to guess the mole at a very early stage of the film and our characters never ever had the slightest of the idea.

Directed by Kanwal Sethi, there is nothing original about this movie. We have seen the ingredients they have used in several other films and one can guess the life expectancy of a character when they are introduced on screen. Hussain Zaidi’s story is basically doing the same old thing. Make the lead characters go after the wrong persons multiple times and reveal the villain at the penultimate moment. But the sad part is that whenever they are introducing a possible double agent, we can sense that it’s just a distraction. Finally when they find out about the real leak in the system with that classic cliché dialogue “isse kaise patha chala?” we will be almost like Chandler and Ross waiting for Joey to get it. Ewan Mulligan, whose collaboration with Anubhav Sinha has delivered some breathtaking visuals in the recent past, has done his bit very neatly with those silhouette shots and shadowy visuals.

Mouni Roy plays the character of Uma here. A pregnant undercover agent and the pitch of the performance was pretty close to a daily soap performance. Purab Kohli has an inherent charm which makes his combination scenes with Mouni passable, but as that tough guy who does the tracking and punching, he wasn’t at all convincing. Kulraj Randhawa plays another major role here as Nirupama, the Indian ambassador.

The movie is only 77 minutes long and the only thing it wants to say is China is trying to end the world. And looking at the state of affairs in our country, that’s a sentiment to cash in, as people might even go on to say this is a very “relevant” movie. London Confidential is just a hastily made propaganda film that just wishes to utilize the political climate in the country.

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