Light, likeable, forgettable: Deepanjana Pal on Vir Das’s Happy Patel

A silly spy, a rescue mission, a plot set in Goa... Happy Patel : Khatarnak Jasoos seemed to have it all, yet the only memorable element is Aamir Khan.

In Marty Supreme, director and co-writer Josh Safdie establishes his hero as a liar and adulterer within minutes. Marty, played by Timothée Chalamet, is also self-centred, and obsessed with table tennis.

Vir Das with Mithila Palkar in Happy Patel. Das is sweet and goofy, but doesn’t offer enough edginess or intensity to leave a mark.

Over the course of the film, he will prey on every person he can prey on and leave a trail of destruction behind him as he tries to fund his table tennis career. On paper, Marty Mauser is everything a hero shouldn’t be. Yet he always has the audience on his side.

Beneath the veneer of the con artist, Marty Supreme has layers. He is a working-class man with ambitions beyond his station. He is a Jew navigating an anti-Semitic America. He’s a proud athlete who would rather be treated with contempt than pity.

Ultimately, Marty’s victory may be gift-wrapped in defeat, but he does have the last laugh; the bad behaviour is him taking a swipe at a world that will not let him win.

I found myself thinking about unlikeable characters and Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, while watching Marty Supreme. The two films are worlds apart, but both find ways of making unpleasant men seem charismatic.

Happy Patel opens with Aamir Khan’s pitch-perfect cameo as Jimmy Mario, a hilariously cartoonish mafia don. Khan clearly had fun playing an unadulterated baddie, and delivers some of the best comedy we’ve seen in Hindi cinema in recent years.

In terms of both subject and tone, Happy Patel is an unusual offering from Aamir Khan Productions, which is known for making intelligent films that target the audience’s conscience first and heartstrings later. Co-produced, co-directed and co-written by stand-up comedian Vir Das, who also plays the lead, this movie is dumb, and deliberately so.

It follows a British spy of Indian origin who is sent to Goa to rescue a kidnapped agent and finds himself on a journey of self-discovery.

He has none of the qualities one expects in either a hero or a spy, but Happy is sweet, and most of the people around him are about as inept as he is. The capable ones are women and gay men, which roots this madcap comedy firmly in the progressive worldview of the 2020s.

Happy Patel is enjoyable, but neither edgy nor inventive. It’s a deftly-stitched-together patchwork of clichés and silliness.

It’s refreshing to see a comedy from Bollywood that isn’t crass and, a hero who is characterised by bumbling sweetness. Unfortunately, if the film’s argument is that a modest, good man can also be hero material, it is undercut by Khan, who steals the spotlight as the dashing, melodramatic Jimmy Mario.

Happy is an entertaining character with many funny scenes, but he isn’t charismatic. If only goodness didn’t feel insipid, and bad guys weren’t so good at being memorable.

(To reach Deepanjana Pal, write to @dpanjana on Instagram. The views expressed are personal)