Mr Bond (1992)

Akshay Kumar is Mr Bond, the best detective in India! He's more than a detective of course, he's a one man army, a Schwarznegger-wannabe without the muscles and with a sillier hair cut. He's here to save India from yet another master criminal, the dangerous Red Dragon (Pankaj Dheer) who kidnaps little children and forces them to work for him in his palace outside Bangkok! If they make one single mistake - they die!!!! He also has an army of Ninjas on motocrosses, which make this movie slightly better than it deserves to be.

Ninjas can make a movie stand up proud, and Mr Bond proudly showcases a whole bunch of incompetent Ninjas for Mr Bond to kill, one after another. Do you notice something? Yeah, I'm trying to avoid going into more details in the story because the DVD didn't include any English subtitles! So I had to guess most of the stuff in-between the action and sometimes even the action itself. Mr Bond is not a masterpiece and it's more of typical eighties action flick than a typical James Bond-rip off. Sure, it has the super agent, a evil villain, lots of action - but the atmosphere is more Michael Dudikoff than Roger Moore.

The story is simple and quite naive, and it's truly not involving enough for Mr Bond to save a dozen kids in Thailand from the white-haired, evil mastermind. We the audience doesn't care enough about this adventure. Give me a "I'm gonna take over the world" or something more Bondish and it would have worked better. Now we're mostly treated to Kumar looking "sexy" - including a hilarious dance number in a gym, almost more graphic than if they shot a real sex scene. Think "Perfect" with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis, but even less sexy. Most of the music sounds like something banging it out quickly on a cheap keyboard and the action sequences is slow and not especially good choreographed.

I was hoping for more excitement when story moved to Bangkok, but all we get is a fun - but badly done - final battle between Mr Bond and the Ninjas plus a hysterical chase inside a recreation park which ends with Mr Bond and Red Dragon compete with each other on two separate water slides!!! Yeah, it's silly and anticlimactic.

If you wanna see a Bollywood movie with that eighties action vibe, watch the 1988 Bollywood classic Commando instead. It delivers action and also has Ninjas plus the whole ending is stolen scene for scene from Where Eagles Dare! That's a masterpiece in trashy action!

Yeah, it might sound that I hated Mr Bond. No, I didn't. But I expected more, especially after the first scene that reminded me a lot about the villa-sequence in Mark Lester's Commando. Lots of shooting, throwing knifes and Mr Bond in camouflage outfit. This was just OK entertainment for the moment and something only fans of cheap action could appreciate to the fullest.