Film Review: Naam Shabana
Tapsee Pannu in a still from ‘Naam Shabana’, the prequel to the 2015 hit ‘Baby’.
A scene in the 2015 thriller Baby sparked an idea for a prequel. The result is Naam Shabana, which tediously weaves the backstory of Shabana Khan (Tapsee Pannu), a college student recruited by a counter-intelligence agency.Neeraj Pandey, who directed Baby, is the writer of Naam Shabana and his enthusiasm has clearly resulted in much fill-in-the-blanks with director Shivam Nair unable to edit out the overstatement.
We see everything—details of Shabana’s home life, her relationship with her mother, with her friends and a bubbling romance. We hear of her painful past and witness her present in which she is desperate for vengeance. Pannu is hardly likable. She scowls a lot and even treats her boyfriend poorly. Her one channel for venting her latent aggression is in her Kudo classes. It’s a little like the Quantico plot, if you can fill in the blanks.
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