Review: Two thumbs down for It's Breaking News

STUNG BY A STING: Koel Purie's performance in the film is the final blow.

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Cast: Koel Purie, Abhimanyu Shekhar Singh, Vinay Apte

Direction: Vishal Inamdar

Also at the multiplexes this week is a film that claims to cast an honest eye on the operations of the news media, an expose on television sting-journalism. The film, It's Breaking News directed by Vishal Inamdar, is what I'd call a poor cousin of Madhur Bhandarkar's Page 3 because it borrows its basic premise from one of the subplots in Bhandarkar's film, but doesn't have any of the wit or that tongue-in-cheek attitude of Page 3.

Koel Purie stars as an entertainment reporter for a news channel who's been assigned to the crime beat, a job she's not particularly excited about. But she fast chances upon exactly the kind of stories that she feels can make a difference.

On learning about a police officer who's been sexually abusing a young girl, Koel exposes the racket through a sting operation, hoping to bring the young girl's plight to the attention of the country. But as she discovers soon enough, her bosses seem interested only in exploiting the victim's story for higher TRPs.

Disguised as a film that's got its heart in the right place, a film that exposes the double standards of the media, It's Breaking News is actually a highly objectionable film because it commits exactly the same crime that it claims to shed light on - look at the exploitative manner in which the director shoots that sting-operation, and look at the wishy-washy manner in which it addresses the issue.

Exaggerated to the point of being embarrassing, the characters and the situations in this film are way over-the-top, which brings me to the one burning question I want to ask the film's director - would just a little research have hurt?

Reinforcing every stereotype associated with journalists, this film falls into a rut that it can't get itself out of. And if that wasn't bad enough, let's just say Koel Purie's performance is the final blow.

I'm going with zero out of five and two thumbs down for director Vishal Inamdar's It's Breaking News - here's a film that's got its head buried so deep in its rear end, that it actually believes it's making a meaningful social comment when truth is, it's only boring you to death with its pretentiousness.

Rating: 0 / 5 (Such Trash!)