In Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, the greatest danger our bumbling protagonist poses is to (what should be) his mother tongue. Raised British, discovered Indian, perpetually confused, Patel’s attempts to speak Hindi accidentally turn every innocent word into an obscenity, if not unwittingly twisting it into double entendres. On the PG-rated end of the scale, the iconic SRK dialogue “Naam toh suna hi hoga” becomes “naam toh tsunami hoga”. A motivational speech hits the spot when it ends with “tum kholo, sab kholenge”. The terrace in “ghar ka chhat” becomes an unprintable slur. Juvenile? Yes. Crass? Frequently. Stupid to the power of infinity? No doubt.
But that’s precisely the point.
Vir Das’s directorial debut, co-directed by Kavi Shastri and co-written by Amogh Ranadive, arrives like an unwanted dinner guest who burps loudly at the table while everyone else is heatedly discussing the state of the nation. At a moment when Bollywood has paralysed itself into a patriotic stupor, when every other release features square-jawed men wrapped in tricolours, Happy Patel commits the ultimate sin: it refuses to take anything seriously.
In the film, nothing is sacred; everything is profane. And much of it is quite edible.
The timing, Das has claimed, was deliberate. In a recent interview, he revealed he’d rewritten a script he’d been sitting on for years, waiting for the right cultural moment. “I had to wait for the universe to let Tiger, War, Pathaan, and Dhurandhar happen,” he explained. “Because comedy is counterculture.” How do you parody a genre that doesn’t exist yet?
And so, at last in 2026, the game is afoot. Our hero: The son of the righteous Sakhubai (Sumukhi Suresh), who sternly insists on completing her jhaadu duties before British spies and a Goan don (Aamir Khan) have themselves a nice little Western salon-style shoot-off. Our boy in the cradle is whisked away to London by Sakhubai’s English gay bosses.
No Kohinoor himself, Happy grows up into a ballet-loving chef who’s failed the MI7 exam seven times. But as fate would have it, he is the only one who can, ostensibly, rescue a British scientist from captivity in Goa, where an infamous don is holding her until she provides the recipe for a failproof fairness cream. Enter our antagonist: “Mama” (Mona Singh), whose lipstick is a shade too red, cutlets a bit too lethal, and ambition about as unfettered as her floral nighties.
What follows is pure pandemonium, and trying to make sense of it is futile. The plot is an afterthought. No, correction: The plot is irrelevant. Happy Patel is what you can expect to get served if someone fed the last 30 years of Bollywood into a blender. It’s as if Andaz Apna Apna and Delhi Belly had a baby, one born out of a night of designer cocktail-drug-laced passion. This is nonsense elevated into an art form, transcendent enough to inspire mixed metaphors (or an almost-there dead-baby joke).
Happy Patel is what you can expect to get served if someone fed the last 30 years of Bollywood into a blender. It’s as if Andaz Apna Apna and Delhi Belly had a baby, one born out of a night of designer cocktail-drug-laced passion. This is nonsense elevated into an art form. ”
The jokes are lobbed at you hard and fast, like tennis balls out of a malfunctioning machine. Sakhubai’s last words concern her Diwali bonus. An NRI can’t be tortured because he’s “watched Slumdog Millionaire three times”—then promptly loses a finger. A waiter moves so slowly that customers receive their orders days later. Naturally, he has an OnlyFans page. Every frame is ridiculous, every character is a caricature of every spy movie trope (and well-rounded ones at that, including Sharib Hashmi as Geet and Srushti Tawade as Roxy), and every gag is juiced till all you have left is pomace with which ace chef Happy Patel could probably whip up a nice little entrée.
The Western DNA is unmistakable. Happy Patel’s spiritual ancestors include Austin Powers, Inspector Clouseau, Mr Bean, and even, to a smaller degree, Frank Drebin Jr. Still, between serving every iconic Bollywood dance move (aw, nostalgia) and a Masterchef-like climactic showdown (featuring Sanjeev Kapoor as judge and Meyang Chang as host), Happy Patel presciently captures our cultural moment: a rampant obsession with cooking competitions, reality talent shows, fairness products, and performative nationalism.
All this unfolds on the first day, fifth show, in a theatre only at 30 per cent of its capacity—we had all stood up for the national anthem, watched Sunny Deol scream from the depths of his soul in a trailer for Border 2 and, as is du jour these days at cinema halls, whistled and clapped as Aamir Khan, Vir Das, and Imran Khan (each hairier than the previous and yet not as hairy as Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Ranvijay Singh) make their slow-mo appearances on screen. We haven’t hit the interval yet, and two girls seated in the row below me are swiping through adhesive nail packs instead of appreciating Rupa’s (Mithila Palkar) tremendous dance skills.
It goes further downhill when one of these patrons of the cinema has to explain the Tum-Tom joke to the other.
In another recent interview, Das talked about how he made this movie for the “new Indian”. The one who is online all the time, watches comedy for five to six hours each day, has the world at their fingertips. He doesn’t know where this audience is exactly, but he’s certain that it exists.
I reckon he means the audience that passes out each night at 3 am watching Netflix (me); opening to a dismal ₹1.25 crore, the film has tanked spectacularly in theatres. I wonder why they didn’t simply follow the straight-to-OTT formula, because this is the sort of film cut for cult fandom, with lines and characters that could live a long life in the meme canon. The kind that will be taken seriously by those who communicate in Tropic Thunder GIFs. Who talk about how Four Lions changed their lives at every social event. Who spend too many hours on Reddit sharing Go Goa Gone and Madgaon Express factoids.
Where are these guys? Probably doing a “Taika Waititi for dummies” session with ChatGPT as they wait for Marty Supreme to download.
In short: Not at the theatre.
Can Vir Das save Bollywood from itself? Probably not. Does he want to? Most definitely not. The reign of the hyper-masculine patriot is nowhere near over, and those of us not interested in the testosterone spill are hiding at home, finding solace in ’90s reruns, true crime, K-dramas, and detective Blanc Benoit’s antics. But the existence of Happy Patel—who could save nobody, not even himself—lets us believe that there is a world for us out there. A world where brain-rot breathes like freshly decanted wine, built for us misfits and traitors who fuck up now and then. What do we do then? Like Happy Patel, we grin and bear it.
