Anamika review: Sunny Leone, Vikram Bhatt's show is a scrapyard for tried and tested action-thrillers tropes

Language: Hindi

A special agent amasses codes and secrets and then disappears reappearing a few years later without any memory of a past life. This reappearance sets off a chain of events and a manhunt that zigzags across cities and towns.

That was 2016 and that was Matt Damon in and as Jason Bourne. Sunny Leone is no Damon and her 2022 Anamika is no Bourne.

It’s a big ask and yet writer-director Vikram Bhatt casts Sunny Leone as an action heroine suffering from retrograde amnesia. Anamika is leading a normal life, working as a hospital receptionist in Faridabad, playing house with her boyfriend Dr Prashant (Ayaz Khan). Her peace is shattered when she becomes the heroine of a terror attack on the hospital. When her face is plastered all over the news media, her past comes racing to catch up with her.

Suddenly drug lords, corrupt businessmen, shady politicians and the agency she once worked for are all trying to figure out where Anamika/ Mahi was all these years. Anamika would also like to fill in the blanks but though her mind does not remember much, her instincts kick in. She turns into a hacker, a killer and a martial arts exponent. She was one the best the agency trained and now she’s “gone rogue,” says her former boss Ravi Shrivastav (Rahul Dev) without any emotion.

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Even as she is attacked from all quarters, it’s hardly any contest as Anamika easily fends off attackers, even though she hasn’t trained or used a weapon in three years! She finally meets her match in the agency’s current hotshot agent Rhea (Sonnalli Seygall). Anamika’s amnesia coupled with trauma, a relentless chase and confusion about the cat-and-mouse game (with an unreasonably high body count) bring her to a precipice, leaving the long-winded show poised for a second season.

Sunny Leone does not have the agility or the acting range to carry off the role. Her default expression is anguish. The dubbing artist’s monotone does her further disservice.

Basic action sequences (especially the tacky confrontation in the market between Leone and Seygall) without fluidity or skill, and the inefficacy of the computer graphics pull down the show’s visual appeal. The supporting actors range from caricatures (Ansari, an expletive spewing drug dealer dressed in all-white) to deadpan (Shrivastav) to slightly camp (Sameer Soni as businessman Sameer Oberoi).

The script is littered with the same information being conveyed multiple times and the characters often speaking in platitudes and clichés. The eight-episode series is a scrapyard for tried, tested and overused action-thriller tropes. One must be grateful for the faster playback speed options available on MX Player.

Anamika is available to stream on MXPlayer.

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer, film critic, and festival programmer.

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