Most gobsmacking brilliant portion of Agent Vinod is a roughly 3-minute shootout scene set in a seedy East European motel. Even as bullets fly in the lobby between RAW-agent Vinod (Saif Ali Khan) and deadly assassins hot on his trail, a love ballad drowns out the gunshots. The action is captured almost poetically, as Vinod and his accomplice run in and out of corridors and motel rooms, dodging the firing. Now imagine all this in a single tracking shot!

The new ‘Agent Vinod’ checks off each item on the list, holding out the promise of a well-crafted, high octane spy thriller. But practically from the moment it started to unspool, I began being assailed first by doubt, then with sinking conviction : this was not the Sriram Raghavan film I’d been waiting for. This around-the-world in two-and-a-half very long hours is all dressed up, with some slick set-pieces, but it spends most of its time in plodding through genre conventions. Where’s the crackle?

Agent Vinod wants to be funny, and while there is the occasional burst of wit, it’s exhaustingly rare. Sriram Raghavan is, first and foremost, a film fanboy, and sure this film has references sprinkled through it – the greatest salutes being to the 1978 Don, with a mention of that immortal character’s dislike of a person’s shoes, and with inconveniently dead Iftekhaars who are the only ones aware of a protagonist’s true allegiance – it doesn’t make the cut.

The result is that Agent Vinod never becomes more than the sum of its parts and even though it picks up speed in the second half, it leaves you both exhausted and unsatisfied. But I enjoyed the character of Agent Vinod. If he does get a sequel, I hope he has a better narrative to romp in.

What’s Good: The action sequences; the stylized cinematography; the snappy editing.What’s Bad: The ordinary story; the unnecessarily confusing script; the lack of an emotional connection between the audience and the protagonist; the absence of chemistry between Saif and Kareena’s characters; the laughable climax.Verdict: Agent Vinod is a bold experiment gone wrong; certainly not something that entertains in its entirety.Watch it only if you want to see an Indian spy movie. But be warned that it comes nowhere closer to the Bond or the Bourne series of Hollywood films.

Overall, the story has flaws, there is too much travelling to make you go dizzy and it’s not the Raghavan you wanted that you see. But it’s not all that bad either. The movie works in bits and parts and shines in a few sequences. A one-time watch.