Why is this film not a pure music video, or a 'Lara Croft: Tom Raider' type video game? Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's a spin-off-the kind of pix Hollywood makes tonnes of money from, along with remakes, reboots, and sequels. The movie has evidently been spun off from the introductory scene of the character Shabana (Taapsee Pannu: supremely fit, and feisty), who enters rather late into Neeraj Pandey's 'Baby' (2015), looking quiet and submissive, dressed in salwar kameez, and suddenly transforms herself to take on a bunch of baddies with her badass martial arts moves.

The movie begins three years before the events of Baby, setting the plot around 2011. Indian secret service suffers humiliation when they are unable to catch a dreaded arms dealer, Mikhail, who kills two of their agents. The action moves to Mumbai, where we find Shabana (Taapsee Pannu), a Commerce student who is also a Kudo champion. She is being tracked by this secret agency for some time without her knowledge. One fateful night, during a late night ride with her boyfriend, a group of hooligans accost them and her boyfriend is killed in the process.

Director Shivam Nair, who last tried the thriller genre in his 2015 disastrous outing, Bhaag Johnny, has explored another not so edgy thriller film Naam Shabana. Whoever goes in expecting a film to be on lines of the Taapsee Pannu starrer Pink or Baby, will be let down. Producer-writer Neeraj Pandey pens down a film which highlights the issue of self-defence and women safety.

Life isn't a cakewalk for undercover agent Shabana Khan. So she has no patience for baby steps. For her, it's all-out war or nothing. The girl has inner demons to deal with, tragic blows to tide over and a vengeance plan to execute in a hurry. She does all this - and more - on her own terms if one discounts the hand-holding and pep-talking the men around her do before, and after, easing her into the snake-pit of global espionage. Naam Shabana is all about "desh ke liye jeena aur marna".

Early in director Shivam Nair's Naam Shabana, the eponymous heroine asks her beau why he loves her. He replies: I doubt if any man has said this to a woman before, but I love you because being with you makes me feel safe. Since there is no logical or biological reason why the fellow should assume that no man feels emotionally safe with a woman, I assume the allusion here is to a sense of physical security inspired by the feisty Shabana's exceptional martial arts prowess.

Her name is Shabana. But people don't call her Shabbo 'pyaar se'. She doesn't seem to have a 'pet' name; she is stern and means business. What's not to like about a film which toplines a young woman capable of kicking serious butt? Given producer and writer Neeraj Pandey's record of ratcheting up the patriotic quotient in his films, it comes as no surprise that 'Naam Shabana's leading lady does it for her country.

Blame this prequel on the media. Most critics who saw Neeraj Pandey's action-drama, Baby (2015) praised agent, Shabana's cameo in it. Her brisk action-sequence in a Kathmandu hotel room, when accompanying Ajay Singh (Akshay Kumar) on a mission, provided the required adrenaline-rush. Taking the praise to their heart, this time around, the makers dedicated 148 mins, (really?) to the spunky agent. Sorry, but the running time is the film's first inherent flaw. Frankly, Shabana shone in Baby because she was in a cameo. Someone missed the point, guys.

Two Indian agents get killed in Austria by an arms and trafficking kingpin Mikhail. In the meanwhile, in India, Shabana (Taapsee) is a college student and a Kudo player. While on a date with her lover Jay (Taher Shabbir), Shabana undergoes an eve-teasing incident that ends up in the death of Jay by the eve-teasers. Shabana is hot headed, has a deadly past and now with the death of her innocent boyfriend is even more wounded.

Reason to go see Naam Shabana? There are five: Taapsee. Taapsee. Taapsee. Taapsee. Taapsee. This Delhi-raised actor, who I have never seen in a film before, with her lovely Jat Sikh athletic build, the terrific gazelle grace in which she runs and the zeal with which pulls those karate punches, leaves your jaw dropping. She is not hot in that traditional Indian naree sense. Nope, no coy, curvy-hipped, cross-between-Mandakini-and-Sati-Savitri syrupy desi feminine stuff for her. Thank god. Taapsee, like the sound of her name, is a feisty, sturdy modern Indian girl and she plays it in the film. And you love it.

The surprise package of Baby, Taapsee Pannu, kicking some serious butt, Akshay Kumar's one-liners and lots of thrills - Naam Shabana looks full of crowd-pleasers on the surface, and if in doubt, there's always Bharat Mata Ki Jai. The problem is that the trailer gave it all away, which, by default, makes the first half of Naam Shabana a drag. Shabana (Taapsee) is a reserved second year B.Com student whose life revolves around Kudo training and her widowed mother. Her classmate Jai (Taher Mithaiwala) is smitten by her, but is only stuck with ferrying her back-and-forth from college, because she does not entertain his declarations of love.

NAAM SHABANA is a thriller that mirrors the private life of a secret agent and the drama and action that is associated with it. The film starts off with broad daylight murders of two secret agents. This is followed by the introduction of the 'tit-for-tat' natured Shabana Khan (Taapsee Pannu), who lives with her mother in the bylanes of Mumbai. Upon the insistence of her boyfriend Jai (Taher Shabbir Mithaiwala), Shabana reveals her disturbed past life wherein she was jailed by the juvenile court for killing her alcoholic and abusive father.

A few years back, Neeraj Pandey and Akshay Kumar had teamed up for a crack spy thriller named Baby, which had made us confident that Bollywood has finally arrived when it comes to spy fiction on the silver screen. The film was such a big hit that it encouraged the makers to make a separate film on one of the characters from Baby named Shabana (Taapsee Pannu) and thus was Naam Shabana conceived. However, does it match up to the brilliance of Baby?