Reporting Live Movie Review Ft. Parineeti Chopra In A Journalism Film You Have Watched 10,000 Times Already!
Star Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Deven Bhojani, Adil Hussain, Shekhar Suman, and others
Director: Dhruv Tripathi
What’s Good: I will have to figure that out, but Deven Bhojani for sure!
What’s Bad: The painful reliance on outdated journalism stereotypes, preachy dialogues that read like an essay competition!
Loo Break: Whenever the main character starts lecturing her senior editors on ‘what real journalism is’!
Watch or Not?: You can totally skip this one!
Language: Hindi
Available On: Netflix
Runtime: 1 hour and 56 Minutes
User Rating:
“Yeh story chhod dete hain. Ye maamla hum dono ke bus ka nahi hai. Hum seedhe log hain, hum nahi handle kar paayenge ye sab. Main haar maan gaya. Mujhe kisi ko prove nahi karna hai kuch. Aaj Ira ko utha liya, kal ko pata nahi kya karenge ye sab…Mar gaye Shiva Kaka. Aur unke jaise hazaaron log mar jaayenge. Kisi ko koi farq nahi padega. Mujhe maaf kar de,” tells a heartbroken Vinod (Deven Bhojani) to her colleague Sandhya Yadav (Parineeti Chopra). While Sandhya walks off in frustration, you can see the truth behind this one dialogue! The truth that a common man, no matter what, cannot fight the powerful! And when that powerful group involves a sand mining mafia, a reputed builder, then you cannot even think about this fight.
But in a dreamy world of Reporting Live, probably you can! When it comes to investigative journalism, every journalist-based story follows the same trope! It has a checklist, and this crime thriller checks all of them! There is the honest reporter who follows the ethics of journalism but has no idea how the real world works. There is the newsroom politics, with the editor who is stuck under the corporate ladder, and there is the corporate-versus-ethics conflict, where the channel’s owners have interests that clash with the truth. And there is a nexus – a drug racket, a sand mining nexus, a human trafficking nexus, or any other illegal nexus you can think of, and finally it ends with a song that is a reiteration of Insaaf ki dagar pe or something on similar lines!
Reporting Live Movie Review: Script Analysis
Reporting Live checks all the boxes of a journalism story! Sandhya Yadav and Vinod are a team that unveils stories. One day, while covering a collapsed bridge, they led to an illegal sand-mining racket, and their channel broke the story, with TRPs touching the sky! But what follows next is literally every media house – corporate pressure, pressure from politicians, and the bigwigs, and the story gets dropped!
What follows next is the exact cliche you expect – A powerful builder/mafia, his goons, a murder, a kidnapping, a family threat, and a powerful silence! All of this forms the premise of Reporting Live!
Reporting Live Movie Review: Star Performance
Parineeti Chopra finds herself in a tough spot here. She performs like a parrot trying to fly like an eagle, as one of the antagonists tells her. She is squawking out grand, preachy dialogues about ‘ethics and nation’ while the script gives her no solid ground to land on. She is totally a misfit as a journalist here. Deven Bhojani is a brilliant character, and he proves it in such a shoddy script as well! Shekhar Suman and Adil Hussain, as the channel owners fighting the ethics vs corporate trope, have nothing new! Amol Palekar on screen is always a treat to watch, though he did not have much to do here!
Reporting Live Movie Review: Direction, Music
Directed by Dhruv Tripathi and written by Mihir Jadhav and Dhruv Tripathi, the film has nothing new. It has nothing old either. Illegal sand mining is a real and underreported issue, but the film should have had a lot to say about journalism, if not the crime. But it says nothing substantial! The intent is right, and on paper, the cast is strong, with Amol Palekar, Adil Hussain, and Shekhar Suman in the mix. But the screenplay is too boring and dull!
Almost everything that is supposed to give the story urgency is missing in this film! The central character is written as the kind of journalist who is told how the world works in every other scene and still seems surprised by it. The film wants us to admire her ethics, but it makes her so naive that she looks plain stupid to me! In her carelessness and dimwittedness, she is a genuine threat to people and their safety. The conflict never builds real tension, because you can predict each beat before it comes. The song at the end generates a little pathos, but the rest of the music is bizarre! At one point, the team witnessing its Breaking News going Live behind some sargams was out of my understanding!
Reporting Live Movie Review: The Last Word
Reporting Live is a film with a good cause and a tired script. The subject deserves a sharper, braver treatment than this, and the lead deserves a better part. The problem isn’t the theme; it’s the absolute lack of nuance. The newsroom politics feel like a caricatured playground fight between ‘saintly truth-tellers’ and ‘evil suit-wearing executives.’ Instead of showing methodical investigative work following financial trails, vetting sources, and verifying evidence, the script treats journalism like a superhero. Sandhya is written like a dimwit hero who stumbles into life-threatening situations without a basic safety plan, relying entirely on I do not know what.
At one point, I genuinely wanted to pause and search if India even has this much sand left to make 10,000 films about sand mining?
In the final scene, the ethical editor tells the CEO of Azaad channel (oh, such a cliche name for a news channel that is not Azaad) – Tum logon ki wajah se journalism ek circus ban gaya hai, isliye socha ki jaate jaate kuch accha kar jaaun. Ab tum bhi Azaad ho aur main bhi! That is the flattest lecture I have seen this year!
1.5 star!
Reporting Live Trailer
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