‘Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos’ review: Spy comedy gets by on whimsy and charm

I wonder if Vir Das was a fan of Scrubs. So much in Happy Patel reminded me of Zach Braff’s sitcom: the cutaways and inserts, the sheer number of throwaway gags, the gravitation towards sweetness and light. This sort of busy, packed, self-aware comedy has a robust tradition in American film and TV. But we don’t see it much in India—which makes Happy Patel a bit of a curiosity, as foreign-returned as its protagonist.

The film opens with two British agents carrying out an extraction in Goa, which goes terribly wrong when local don Mario (Aamir Khan, this film's producer, enjoying himself a little too much) crashes the party. They just about survive, taking with them Happy, the baby son of their domestic worker, who’s caught in the crossfire. This prologue is pure farce, funny while it lasts, but it doesn't have the heft to give the film an obvious emotional throughline—that the daughter of Mario, who’s fatally shot, will swear revenge on Happy, who’s adopted by the agents and raised in England.

If the objective is ‘get Happy to India in as few steps as possible’, Das, co-writer Amogh Ranadive and co-director Kavi Shastri do an exemplary job. In double quick time, Happy (Das) is undergoing India training at ‘MI7’ (bargaining over groceries, watching Shah Rukh movies, all the essentials), and then he’s in Goa. He meets his contact, Geet (Sharib Hashmi), the far more competent Roxy (Srushti Tawde), who rents him a dusty apartment, and falls instantly in love with Rupa (Mithila Palkar), as bad a dancer as he is a secret agent.

The idea that Happy has been taught Hindi in a few weeks shoulders a lot of the comic weight. Every line he utters is a mistake or a malapropism—gorey (white) becomes ghodey (horse), chhath (roof) becomes [redacted]. The film doubles down on this by including all the mistakes in the subtitles, which just makes them dirtier. On the other hand, the recurring gags—Happy pronouncing ‘tum’ as ‘tom’ and a white man named Tom appearing, the parodic jingle for his catering venture back in England whenever he cooks anything—feel too much like American sitcoms and grate after a while (Das' standup instincts sometimes take precedence over his duties as film writer and director).

After Chhaya Kadam’s Kanchan Kombdi in Madgaon Express (2024), Happy Patel gives us another singular female don in Goa. Mama (Mona Singh) is an unsmiling, fairness cream-selling, Sanjeev Kapoor-watching tyrant. The unassuming Happy believes his mission is to rescue one of the skincare scientists she’s holding captive, but it’s really a setup (this whole plotline seems to exist only to allow for an Imran Khan cameo, greedily teased in the film’s promotions). A perennially disappointed villain is always funny, even though the messy final confrontation wastes both Singh and Das.

I chuckled through Happy Patel, and appreciated its more outlandish swings. Yet, the lasting impression was that I’d seen two hours of decent sketch comedy rather than a cohesive comic feature. The Aamir Khan-produced, Vir Das-featuring Delhi Belly (2011), which this will inevitably be compared to, felt somehow more complete; so do Tere Bin Laden (2010) and Madgaon Express and other flights of silliness. Happy Patel has considerable charm, and jokes to spare. But I always felt the [redacted] was in danger of caving in.