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Prime Video continues with its abundance of drab and dissatisfying fare with Babita Singh Reporting. A purported crime thriller, it just does not thrill. Wonder what is wrong in the Prime hierarchy to pass such asinine fare when the head honchos downwards, the platform’s team, should be a lot more conscious with great fare coming in from Netflix, Jio Hotstar & SonyLIV.
If I had to report on this saga, I would thus say, ‘Film Reviewer Reporting. There is this overweight (as per a cluster of remarks made by characters within this ordeal of a narration!) female cop (Nimisha Sajayan), who is suspended only as a barter when she wants to go on leave. Barter? Yeah, her domineering boss (Rajesh Kumar) wants to escape trouble for himself if Ma’am Babita Singh a.k.a. Baby carries the can for his improper activities. And why does Baby want leave? She has to go to another town for her sister-in-law’s baby shower. She has never gone for any function to her in-laws’ home and they resent that, see?
The first person she encounters there is childhood friend, Bansi (Barun Sobti), who wants to meet her the same night for something important. Baby’s husband, Sharad (Anshuman Pushkar), however, suggests that she postpone their rendezvous for a couple of days until after the event is over. But by next morning, Bansi has been murdered, allegedly by a junkie.
But Baby has cogent reasons to believe that the killer is someone else. And regardless of the time and importance she should ideally give her husband and his family, and haunted by guilt that she never met Bansi, she—clumsily— investigates. A whole cluster of suspects come in—Bansi’s brother Mangal (Nitin Goel), his wife Rupa (Priyanka Setia) and more. To top it all, she has to deal with Bansi’s and Baby’s common close friend Archana (Muskan Arora) and her obnoxious policeman husband (Rajat Dahiya) and try and locate a mysterious red car that was present that night. Baby’s investigations lead to chaos, as clues are there in the open ground where the Ravan effigy is burnt every Dusshera, in the hideout of the junkies, and so on.
Much ado is made of Baby’s suspension, her thyroid issues, her lack of conception of a baby and her getting a police job on compassionate grounds after her father’s on-duty death besides her weight. Altercations and arguments with her husband, a sex scene with him, a bathing sequence with Baby and more all waste time. Baby does not behave either with the courage or the determination of a trained female cop (wonder if ‘compassionately appointed’ cops do not have to learn the ropes?) nor has the guts to defend herself when accused of various things, personal and professional.
With a loser protagonist, you have lost the audience.
Put together, the movie is a big yawn, an object lesson in how not to make a crime thriller. Sadly, it has become convention now for most male and female cops to have a dark or traumatic past that influences their actions, but over here, this stretches to ridiculous lengths, especially in the climactic sequence on Dusshera, while the baby shower event earlier has been relegated almost to the sidelines!
Nimisha Sajayan is a dependable actor, but I wonder why she even accepted this role. Barun Sobti with his hangdog expressions overdoes his maudlin character essay, while the rest really do not matter.
Amita Vyas’ script and Ambiecka Pandit’s direction are illustrative of the fact that they need primary-level lessons in their respective careers.
Rating: *1/2
Prime Video presents Film Squad Productions’ & Act Three’s Babita Singh Reporting Produced by: Saurabh Malhotra, Manoj Mittra & Tina Tharwani Directed by: Ambiecka Pandit Written by: Amita Vyas Music: Ajay Jayanthi Starring: Nimisha Sajayan, Barun Sobti, Anshuman Pushkar, Rajesh Kumar, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Nawal Shukla, Sunita Rajwar, Priya Yadav, Ravi Jhankal, Kuldeep Sareen, Priyanka Setia, Alina Azeem, Rajat Dahiya, Muskan Arora, Mahender Bisht, Amit Kasera, Nitin Goel & others
