Political thrillers are not exactly Bollywood’s speciality, but looks like director Shoojit Sircar is about to change that.

After giving a surprise hit with ‘Vicky Donor’, he has returned with the gritty ‘Madras Cafe’ starring John Abraham and Nargis Fakhri in lead roles.

The trailer starts with a long montage of shots depicting the effects of war and terror. The trailer then shows us John Abraham’s character, an Indian intelligence officer. He’s been assigned covert operations for RAW in Jaffna, a city in northern Sri Lanka.

On the other hand, Nargis Fakhri plays a Sri Lankan journalist (or a Sri Lankan immigrant one), and to keep it authentic, she speaks only in English throughout the trailer. “Criticising our national policies doesn’t make me international,” she says, with an accent.

We are then shown several shots of John Abraham moving among soldiers, and several other genre plot-points like phone-tapping, interrogation, leaks and covert attacks. Naturally, as is wont in such movies, the journalist and intel-officer have contradictory stands about the whole terror issue which causes friction between the two characters.

The trailer ends with a battered John Abraham and a voiceover stating the probable tagline of the movie: “Jo hum dekhte hai, sunte hai, sach sirf utna nahi hota.”

The action seems to be extremely well-shot. It is realistic, rather than having gravity-defying stunts that John Abraham’s last film ‘Shootout At Wadala’ had. John, himself, seems to have given his all to his role, and his acting does not seem wooden, as the usual complaints against him have been. We do not get to see much of Nargis Fakhri, but fans hope that her performance goes better than what she was criticised for in ‘Rockstar’.

‘Madras Cafe’, directed by Shoojit Sircar and co-produced by John Abraham himself is slated for release on 23 August, 2013.