Review – Mission Mangal (Hindi)

Starring: Akshay Kumar, Vidya Balan, Taapsee Pannu, Kriti Kulhari, Sonakshi Sinha, Sharman Joshi, H.G. Dattatreya, Vikram Gokhale, Dilip Tahil, Sanjay Kapoor

Writing Team: Jagan Shakti, Nidhi Singh Dharma, Saketh Kondiparthi

Writer and Creative Director: R. Balki

Music: Amit Trivedi

Producers: Fox Star Studios, Cape of Good Films, Hope Productions

Co-Producers: Anil Naidu, Aruna Bhatia

Story idea and Direction: Jagan Shakti

 

Mission Mangal could have been an inspiring tale of how scientists fought against the odds to launch the Mars Orbiter Mission. Mission Mangal could have been the Indian equivalent to Hidden Figures. Mission Mangal could have been a lot of things………instead, it is unfortunately a bit of a mess.

 

After the failure of the ‘Fatboy’ rocket at ISRO, Rakesh Dhawan (Akshay Kumar) is demoted to the Mars mission, which is due to launch in 2022. This is widely seen as an impossible mission throughout the organisation, hence shifting Dhawan there is nothing but an insult. As the failure of ‘Fatboy’ was partially the fault of Tara Shinde (Vidya Balan), she feels guilty, and whilst her servant is making puris at home, she realises that it will be possible to send a rocket to Mars much earlier. She persuades Dhawan, and they go to the director of ISRO (Vikram Gokhale) to get a team of experts.

 

Unfortunately, American return scientist Rupert Desai (Dilip Tahil) is up against them, and rather than providing experts, he provides the team with junior scientists – Kritika Aggarwal (Taapsee Pannu), who has a husband in the army and struggles to pass her driving test, Eka Gandhi (Sonakshi Sinha), a modern woman who wants to leave the country and go and work for Nasa, Varsha Pillai (Nithya Menen), who is under pressure from her mother in law to get pregnant, Neha Siddiqui (Kriti Kulhari), a recently divorced Muslim who is discriminated against by landlords, Parameshwar Naidu (Sharman Joshi), a devout young man who just wants to get married, and Ananth Iyer (H.G Dattatreya), nearing retirement and wondering why his son does not get in touch any more.  How the team of scientists come together to make the mission successful is what the rest of the film is about.

 

Actually, if that is what the film was about, this would have been a much better film. Whilst I understand that there was a need to give the characters back stories, barring Vidya Balan, the back stories get one-two scenes each, which don’t really do justice to the characters, and hence, you don’t really feel for any of them. Sonakshi Sinha’s introductory scene is her waking up in bed with a random dude (fully clothed, of course, this is a family film) and lighting a cigarette – because smoking and sleeping around are the hallmarks of a modern woman.

 

Most of the performances are decent. I would really have liked to see Vidya Balan headlining this film instead of Akshay Kumar. She looks the part, and convinces as someone trying to balance her work life and the running of her home. Taapsee Pannu has one of the weakest roles she has done recently, and it is a surprise to see someone like her in a film like this. Sonakshi Sinha is, well, Sonakshi Sinha. Kriti Kulhari isn’t stretched by any means, and Nithya Menen is good – but why she chose this as Hindi debut, after working with directors like Mani Ratnam and Santosh Sivan, is beyond me. Sharman Joshi plays an extension of his 3 Idiots character, and H.G Dattatreya is likeable. Special mention goes to Dilip Tahil for hamming it up as an American return scientist, who tells the director of ISRO that he deserves credit for remembering how to speak Hindi after spending years in USA (yes, really).

 

And how can I forget Akshay Kumar? Playing a character that, I understand, is modelled on former ISRO chairman Satish Dhawan, Kumar is saddled with a character that does very little throughout the film, and unfortunately, he is unable to humanise it. When a character feels that the mission is impossible, he shouts and them and tells them to get out. When they return the next day and solve the problem they were struggling with, he takes credit for making them think that way. Aside from this, Kumar is given some awful lines – when asked to take inspiration from NASA, he says that this will be ‘satya-NASA’ for ISRO. I’m sure someone thought this was both hilarious and clever when writing this, but this joke falls flat. So wisecracks and credit taking throughout, but he doesn’t actually contribute anything scientific. At all.

 

The film has a ‘writing team’ of four people – I don’t know if it a case of too many chefs spoil the broth, or whether they added more people because they didn’t want to take credit for it, but the big issue this film has is at the script level. There is unfortunately zero connect with any of the characters (with the exception of Vidya Balan, to an extent), which makes the film hard to like. The less said about the music the better – the songs sound like they were composed and performed on a keyboard in someone’s bedroom – I expected more from Amit Trivedi. Jagan Shakti has assisted R. Balki, Gauri Shinde, and A.R. Murugadoss – but doesn’t manage to make an engaging film. Maybe his next film, Ikka, which is a remake of the Tamil superhit Kaththi, will prove to be better.

 

To finish off, here is my top 5 WTF scenes from Mission Mangal:

 

1. A drunk Akshay Kumar stumbles into a man on the Metro. He pushes back and starts a fight, and the women from their team all beat him and his friends up with their handbags. Team bonding at it’s best.
2. After working out of a run down warehouse for weeks, they decide to clean it up – so the scientists get their brooms and mops out, dance to a song called ‘Dil Mein Mars Hai’, and convert the warehouse to a state of the art facility.
3. Sharman Joshi has a crush on Sonakshi Sinha. They randomly decide to take a break and talk about sex (whilst she is smoking, of course). This doesn’t lead anywhere because he believes in sex after marriage, but Sinha is far too modern for that train of thought.
4. Vidya Balan takes her husband (Sanjay Kapoor, who shouts throughout most of the film) to a club to check up on their teenage daughter, and then he gets the DJ to change from club music to ‘Ankhiyaan Milaoon’ from Raja, so he can shake a leg. His daughter then tells him that he ‘rocked it’.
5. Akshay Kumar bursts into a meeting to convince ISRO personnel to support the Mars mission, then has an imaginary phone call with the late A.P.J Abdul Kalam, and then speaks to Dilip Tahil, in English, with a fake South Indian accent.

 

And a bonus – Vidya Balan fat shames Nithya Menen’s character behind her back, by saying she shouldn’t be the one to make a lightweight satellite – but it’s all ok, because she admits that she isn’t slim herself.

 

I really wish I had made the top 5 up, but those are the gems you will get to see if you decide to watch Mission Mangal!