Rahul Desai
I can declare with utmost confidence in my own taste that Mrs Undercover is clueless. There are no two ways about it. It doesn’t matter which angle you look at it from. It’s not supposed to be a children’s film because the first scene shows a woman-hating psychopath running his car over his Tinder date's body several times so that we can hear every crunch of her broken bones. It’s definitely not supposed to be a whodunit either.
Describing Mrs Undercover might just be akin to criticizing it. So Durga has dreams of beating up goons in a latex suit because the Special Forces have forgotten her after training her 10 years ago. I’ve seen virtue-signalling tweets staged with more depth and guile than the monologues of this film.
The clincher is that this serial killer becomes a footnote once Durga discovers that her sexist husband is a cheater. The only big action scene – a tacky car chase – is reserved for the married couple; Durga saves him from some goons only to stop the car and let them thrash him when he insults her again. It’s almost funny.
Maybe someday I’ll forget that a mercurial actress like Radhika Apte has whole-heartedly appeared in arguably the worst Hindi movies of 2022 (Forensic) and 2023 so far (Mrs Undercover). But today is not that day. I’ve missed OTT star Sumeet Vyas, and playing a Common (Mad)Man seemed like a decent idea until the film forgets him in its pursuit of hashtag feminism.