How Udta Teer loses its target while trying to hit three at once

There is a wonderfully absurd film trapped inside Udta Teer. It revolves around Bilal Ahmed, a Pakistani spy embedded in India’s intelligence system as Vikrant Thapar. Bilal loses his memory in an accident and wakes up believing himself to be a loyal Indian patriot. The joke, and for a while a very effective one, is that he unknowingly begins dismantling the very terror network he once served.The film’s first half embraces this premise with an infectious willingness to be silly. Ayushmann Khurrana plays the amnesiac spy with conviction, while the late Mukul Dev steals scenes as a jihadi juggling terrorism and matrimonial aspirations. Suhail Nayyar is equally entertaining as a fellow Pakistani operative exasperated by his colleague’s sudden change of loyalties. He functions as the audience’s surrogate, repeatedly reminding us of the delicious irony at the heart of the story: a Pakistani sleeper network in India is being brought down not by intelligence brilliance, but by a bout of accidental patriotism.The humour is broad, irreverent and frequently juvenile, but often lands because the film commits so wholeheartedly to its own nonsense. Cleverly deployed old Hindi songs add to the comic rhythm. At times, Udta Teer channels the anarchic spirit of The Naked Gun franchise, where absurdity itself becomes the punchline. Not all of it works. Rahul Bose, cast as an Indian agent, is repeatedly reduced to a victim of increasingly undignified slapstick, including gags involving a corpse in a morgue and a dance sequence while confined to a hospital bed. Yet Bose gamely commits to every moment.Then comes the familiar Hindi-film affliction: the decline and fall of the second-half. What begins as a spy comedy gradually morphs into a patriotic thriller. Bilal’s newfound nationalism leads him to foil a terror strike on the Ram Mandir, while chants of “Jai Shri Ram”, a “Jai Hind” anthem and repeated declarations that “mulk se badhkar kuch nahi (the nation comes first)” take centre stage. The shift would have been easier to accept had the screenplay found a convincing way to bridge its competing impulses. Instead, the film begins to feel as though it is abandoning one script midway and adopting another. Sara Ali Khan’s underwritten character does little to ease the transition. Her presence feels less like an organic part of the narrative than an effort to satisfy a structural requirement. The film’s attempts to fold her into the emotional stakes never quite take hold.The result is a film unsure of whether it wants to be a spoof, a spy thriller or a nationalist drama. In trying to be all three, it never fully succeeds as any of them. The irony is that the very kind of spy spectacle Udta Teer initially appears to parody is precisely what it becomes. The difference is that its blows land more often through slapstick and slogans than action or suspense.That is particularly disappointing because the ambition is admirable. Like Andhadhun (2018), Article 15 (2019), Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021) and An Action Hero (2022), this is another attempt by Ayushmann to push beyond formula. The gamble is evident. So is the desire to twist a familiar genre into a more playful shape.Unfortunately, the film’s most inventive idea ends up buried beneath its own confusion. Udta Teer begins with a sharp comic premise and enough confidence to sustain it. But somewhere between the espionage spoof, the nationalist sermon and the mainstream action film it desperately wants to become, it loses sight of its original target. By the end, the spy may have recovered a sense of purpose, but the film never does.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends