The chiseled body, a sharp jawline and all things tall, dark and handsome – Vicky Kaushal in ‘Bad Newz’ is the real eye-candy. The film features the actor in the role of Akhil Chadha, the loud, overbearing, West-Delhi show-off, but that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s almost like watching a slightly exaggerated version of Ranveer Singh’s Rocky Randhawa from Karan Johar’s ‘Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani’. Interestingly, the same production house, Dharma Productions, also backed ‘Bad Newz’.
Vicky is a superb actor, having proven his mettle in films like ‘Masaan’, ‘Sam Bahadur’ and ‘Manmarziyan’, among others. But, in ‘Bad Newz’, he is reduced to just being an object on-screen, the treatment which is usually given to the female parts in most Bollywood films. His emotional range as an actor, or his nonchalance as one of the most real-life looking faces in the industry, find no place in the film. That’s not the biggest problem, though. It’s how underutilised he looks in the entire narrative, which keeps jumping from here and there, from being a love story to a heartbreak-family-trope, eventually turning into a preachy film attempting to be a comedy sometimes.
‘Bad Newz’ is funny, but it confuses you so much that you almost forget to laugh at the scenes that are supposed to tickle your funny bone. But, it’s Vicky who, despite all his potential and sincere efforts, looks heavily lost in the film. It’s a formula film, with glamour, romance, songs, comedy, and a few good-looking faces thrown around – but nothing combines into making it a wholesome package of entertainment. Vicky, unfortunately, in most scenes, looks like someone who’s just been robbed off with nowhere to go.
Also, what happened to giving us romantic-comedies where the hero would, of course, be as good-looking as Vicky, but not be as stupid as Akhil Chadha, lacking any emotional depth, whatsoever? In the most ardently romantic movies that Bollywood has produced, men would, quite literally, get the moons and stars for their beloved. It’s an utter disappointment to realise how our romantic heroes are so full of themselves these days. Like Akhil, who never questions his mother when he is told about being ‘sab toh vadda’ (the biggest of all) since childhood. And when, finally, he starts to discover his real-self and embraces his vulnerability, at the end, a woman has suffered enough, both physically and mentally, to make him learn the better of him.
This brings us to our next problem. For how long will we keep making our women suffer in films to show that our man-child heroes are finally turning into mature husbands and lovers? In ‘Bad Newz’, a poor woman has to go through a lot, only to make the fathers of her babies realise that they have to start acting responsibly. The whole trope comes down to Akhil and Gurbir becoming better at understanding the various complexities of life, and finding mature ways to deal with them.
Most men, in general, in real-life, are not the Rocky Randhawas and Akhil Chadhas of the world. They are responsible. They don’t behave like kids fighting over lollipops when their wives or any female member of the family is fighting between life and death. ‘Bad Newz’ is simply one of those films which let you down for more reasons than one. But, above all, it fails men. And it does definitely fail the fans of Vicky Kaushal, the actor, not the eye-candy!
The Review
Rating Stars
2.5
