Published: 11:23 AM, 04 June 2026
Is Bangladesh's 007 Masud Rana wearing lipstick?
What do you say when the daredevil spy of the fictional Bangladesh Counter-Intelligence, BCI, has pink lips?
Well, watching the latest Masud Rana film, out this Eid, the first baffled reaction: Masud Rana the spy or Masud Rana the romantic lover!
At one point, I was waiting for the epic line: "Chowdhury Saheb, I may be a simple secret agent but your daughter has given me her heart and soul!"
And then, the secret agent, originally modelled after Ian Fleming's 007, is seen doing a dance number.
If this is how the film franchise is developing then the third version of the movie may very well be called, "Masud Rana: License to Masti"!
Or how about "Masud Rana: Mission Jhakanaka".
After watching the current movie, an aghast Rana lover, said: "We're not too far away when we may see a title like: Masud, Ei dil Shudhu Tomar!"
Jokes aside, the film fails to create the dark world of espionage, becoming just another commercial action flick where most of the acting seems forced and contrived.
The Masud Rana film will disappoint most Rana aficionados and outrage readers who have been keenly following the agent's exploits for ages.
Masud Rana has a deep cultural and social root going back to the pre-independent days, developing well throughout the post liberation decades.
As a war-ravaged nation slowly began her journey to prove detractors wrong, Rana became the symbol of a nation's resilience.
Readers knew that an agent of a desperately impoverished country travelling the globe, eating sumptuous meals and getting involved in swashbuckling adventures in exotic places was a fantasy, but in a time of relentless social and political struggle, Rana became the escape, the character who whisked us away from pervasive unsavoury reality into a world of make belief.
That is exactly why any perceived abasement of that character from how it was presented in the books seems like sacrilege.
