Friendly appearance by Florida Man.

 Bollywood has a knack for sudden genre shifts, but A Gentleman (2017) is the only case I can think of where an action comedy suddenly transforms into a different action comedy.  That twist is the bit I find interesting, so naturally I am going to spoil it.

Gaurav Kapoor (Siddharth Malhotra) is a salesman at a software firm in Miami.  His best friend Dixit (Hussain Dalal) accuses him of living his life in reverse - he's got a good job, a nice house in the  suburbs, and a safe and reliable minivan, but he doesn't have a wife to share it with, let alone the four children he's hoping for.  And fair enough!  Gaurav does have his eye on his beautiful but shallow coworker Kavya (Jacqueline Fernandez), but while she's noticed that he's a good looking guy, she thinks he's a bit too safe.  Still, Gaurav is content - Dixit calls him "the happiest sad person I've ever met."

Gaurav has reluctantly agreed to travel to Mumbai for work.  As Kavya drives him to the airport, he's about to tell her something significant, but instead he promises to tell her when he gets back.

Meanwhile Rishi (also Siddarth Malhotra) is a spy working for Unit X, a clandestine organization headed by Colonel Vijay Saxena (Suniel Shetty).  Rishi is not happy, since the other members of his unit, and especially Yakub (Darshan Kumaar) are a little too comfortable with civilian casualties.  When Yakub shoots a man who caught a glimpse of the group after a disastrous mission in Bangkok, Rishi leaves.

The Colonel makes a half-hearted assassination attempt just to get Rishi's attention, then makes him an offer - one last job, and he's free.  All he has to do is intercept a hard drive being delivered to a government official in Mumbai by a guy named Gaurav Kapoor.

This is a perfect setup for a classic mistaken identity comedy, with the two men switching lives, learning valuable life lessons, successfully wooing each other's love interests, and possibly discovering that they're actually long lost twins who were separated during a childhood visit to the fun fair.  But it's a trick - the two plotlines are actually set five years apart, and the real Gaurav is a) played by Kunal Sharma, and b) dead.  This is really Bollywood Grosse Pointe Blank, with a (sort of) reformed assassin trying to live an ordinary life only to discover that he can't outrun his past and he's going to have to outshoot it.  

I'm not sure that this is a deliberate take on Grosse Pointe Blank, and it's certainly not any sort of officially sanctioned remake, but it does hit a lot of the same beats.  It's a black comedy punctuated with light romance and a number of action scenes set in unlikely environments, in this case including a duct tape battle in Home Depot, a martial arts fight in a laundromat, and a whole lot of gunplay in Gaurav's lovely home.

Sidharth Malhotra is often typecast as the earnest, sensible guy who can be counted on to do the right thing, and that's what really makes A Gentleman work. Rishi isn't pretending to be the cheerful stick in the mud and aspiring family man who carefully drives the speed limit and insists on coasters when his guests have a drink; actual Gaurav isn't like that at all, it's just Rishi living his best life.  Sure, it takes being revealed as a killer on the run to get Kavya to take a second look at him, but it's being a grownup that makes the relationship interesting.