Despatch just goes on and on, sighs Mayur Sanap.
For a gripping newsroom drama, Despatch has everything going for it.
A novel premise, a potentially thought-provoking storyline, and an immensely talented actor in the lead. Despite these genuinely interesting hook points, Despatch feels muddled and unexciting, a wasted opportunity for the subject matter it had.
And it makes even Manoj Bajpayee look boring on screen!
The story is about the personal and professional turbulence in Joy Bag’s (Bajpayee) life, a crime reporter at the Despatch daily newspaper.
Joy is struggling to find his next scoop in times when the threat of news digitisation looms large.
A shocking daylight murder occurs and the headline-hungry Joy finds his big opportunity.
At home, his marriage with wife Shweta (Shahana Goswami) is on the verge of collapse as they keep bickering with each other.
Joy is having an affair with his colleague and fellow journalist Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), who is also ghost-writing his crime novel and is planning to move in with him after his divorce.
As the drama move forwards, Joy finds himself getting into murky waters of the crime underbelly and it pushes him to make some difficult choices.
From the beginning, we know Joy is a morally dubious character.
Director Kanu Behl and his co-writer Ishani Banerjee don’t shy away from creating a protagonist with all his garish flaws.
Joy is difficult to root for, be it with his rash decisions, dodgy journalistic ethics as well as his manipulative nature with women around him.
This is not new for a Kanu Behl film, whose Agra and Titli also had morally complex men as protagonists. In Despatch, the efforts feel engineered to make this journalist as repulsive as possible.
The premise is interesting but is told in a bland way that never keeps you invested.
We are subjected to convoluted details where names like Sundaram, Sylvia, Wadhwa, are constantly thrown at you and don’t explain much about the story. This is something Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani did so well where the viewers are engrossed without undermining the tedious nature of the plot.
For most of its runtime, Joy is just meandering aimlessly and we are supposed to be on the edge of our seats waiting for him to scoop out the answer together. But we get no major revelations or new piece of information, it is just a few questions asked here and there and suddenly the film jumps to Joy’s domestic issues.
As a result, the drama feels completely drawn out and the pace feels all over the place.
You wonder how good this endeavour could have been if handled correctly, reminding us why Hansal Mehta’s Scoop was so watchable.
Manoj Bajpayee just does what he does best, and that’s not really a shocker to anyone.
He is the epicentre of the film and too experienced an actor to go wrong. But there’s a monotony setting in his performance that reduces him to just a generic watch here.
Debutante Arrchita Agarwaal is impressive as a fierce feminist who somehow finds herself hopelessly in love with Joy. She manages to showcase various emotions in a character that gets the short end of the stick, just like the other two women in the film.
Shahana is left to put her acting might without proper characterisation of a lovelorn wife, as does Rii Sen as Joy’s fellow journalist.
For what was supposed to be a slow burn, Despatch just goes on and on. By the end of it, Joy remains mostly clueless about what’s happening and so is the audience.
Despatch streams on ZEE5.
Despatch Review Rediff Rating:
