Rann

For a movie that purports to be a serious look into rot in the news media, Rann is a surprisingly amateurish product. The characters are borderline caricatures, and the script isn’t the most intelligent you have come across. The background score and soundtrack are loud and just plain bad. The movie has its heart in the right place – the message it wants to communicate is relevant in our times, but as a movie, Rann is pretty much a failure.

The broad outline of the plot is this – evil politician and evil businessman get together with ailing news channel to do a fake sting operation. The sting operation implicates a sitting minister who is forced to resign, and evil politician becomes the minister, driving up ailing news channel TRPs as well. But the fake sting is exposed with a real sting operation by an honest journalist and all is well in the world.

The story might sound simplistic, but if written correctly, it could have been a good movie. However in Rann, there are no real life characters – they are either uber bad or uber good. So Vijay Harshvardhan Malik is the morally upright news channel host who is only good. And there is Amrish Kakkar, owner of rival news channel who is just sleazy. Newbie journalist Purab Shastri is only good – and so on. The only grey character is Jai Malik, who atleast has a dilemma between the righteous path and his desire to regain the number 1 spot. In most other Hindi movies, such characterization wouldn’t be a target of any criticism, but in a supposedly realistic movie like this, it is just ridiculous.

And the criticism of the writing is not limited to the morality of the characters – some of the other characters and parts are written just written too badly. Witness the argument between Gul Panag and Riteish Deshmukh – couldn’t get more fake than that. Or the scene where Riteish is ‘following’ someone – which is defined as roaming the entire day exactly one car-length behind the target !! Or rival news channel regularly pre-empts your shows and no one even thinks of looking for the mole. There are too many such holes in the script – which would turn off any intelligent mind.

The saving grace is the performance by Riteish Deshmukh and Suchitra Krishnamurthy. Riteish Deshmukh plays Purab Shastri in an understated way, and with the beard, he looks completely different from what we are used to seeing. Suchitra Krishnamurthy comes back to the mainstream after a long while and makes her character half believable just by her acting. Amitabh plays pretty much himself – which isn’t bad, but we have seen it countless times before. His monologue at the end of the movie makes a lot of sense in defining the status of media in the society – but it comes too late in the movie and you have already given up on it.

On the bad side there is Paresh Rawal, with a ridiculous amount of red sindoor on his forehead and dark glasses – he shows a remarkable resemblance to a red-faced languor common in our jungles. There is also Neetu Chandra, who actually stakes a very serious claim to a RGV’s horror-next with her wild eyed performance in the climax.

The look of the movie is very Ram Gopal Varma – anyone who has seen Sarkar (or the miserable few who saw Phoonk) would recognize the close-ups with dark background & shadows as his signature style. But the soundtrack and the background score are just offensive – loud and garish.

Could have been a very watchable movie – but in its current form, give it a miss. And maybe wait for Madhur Bhandarkar’s version.