Reporting Live review: Parineeti Chopra's investigative film has a story to tell, but little excitement to offer

Reporting Live review: The newsroom atmosphere has no unnecessary glamourisation of the profession. It is closer to No One Killed Jessica in its depiction.

Reporting Live

Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Deven Bhojani, Amol Palekar, Adil Hussain, Shekhar Suman, and Saswata Chatterjee

Director: Dhruv Tripathi

Star rating: ★★.5

Where to stream: Netflix

Reporting Live review: Parineeti Chopra in a still from the investigative crime thriller.

Hansal Mehta's Scoop is everything Reporting Live aspires to be. The basic premise is similar: a female journalist gets caught up in a mess while doing her job. There's a mafia/underworld track thrown in for good measure, too. But do the two measure up? For starters, Scoop had six episodes to flesh out its story and explore its characters, while Reporting Live has to wrap up everything in about two hours. That's a significant difference, but is it enough to explain the gap in their impact?

The premise

Directed by Dhruv Tripathi, Reporting Live revolves around Sandhya (Parineeti Chopra), a journalist waiting for her first primetime scoop. Her team includes video journalist Vinod (Deven Bhojani). When a bridge collapses in Visargao, sending a bus plunging into the river and claiming 15 lives, the incident is dismissed as an accident. But Sandhya and Vinod stumble upon a darker truth: illegal sand mining and its connection to the bridge collapse. How the duo navigates threats to their lives and careers to bring the truth to light forms the rest of the plot.

Movie Review

Reporting Live

2.5/5

It follows a fearless reporter (Chopra) and her cameraman (Bhojani) who investigate a fatal bridge collapse, uncovering a dangerous illegal sand-mining racket run by a ruthless syndicate.

Director

Dhruv Tripathi

Verdict

Reporting Live is a case of a promising premise let down by predictable writing.

What works

What Reporting Live gets right is its pace. Initially, there's rarely a dull moment as we are introduced to Sandhya's workplace, helmed by characters played by Adil Hussain and Shekhar Suman. Being a journalist myself, I found the newsroom atmosphere particularly relatable. There's no unnecessary glamourisation of the profession (a la Alia Bhatt's Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani). Instead, the film is closer to No One Killed Jessica, at least in its depiction of the round-the-clock stress that comes with the job.

The antagonist, played by Nasser, is another case of the familiar taking precedence over the unexpected. In the OTT age, when viewers have access to stories from across the world, predictability can be poison. The background score doesn't help matters either, lacking the punch required to heighten the tension and becoming repetitive after a point.

Performance-wise, Parineeti Chopra does a decent job, while Deven Bhojani is wonderful, making you genuinely feel for his character. Shekhar Suman fits the role of the cunning businessman perfectly. Adil Hussain, meanwhile, has an effortless likeability about him.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, Reporting Live is a case of a promising premise let down by predictable writing. The brisk pace and solid performances make it watchable, but the film never quite builds the tension its subject demands. If Scoop showed how a journalist's pursuit of a story could make for compelling drama, Reporting Live is content with merely telling one. In a story about journalists chasing the truth, that's a rather underwhelming scoop.