Story: A top journalist gets the opportunity of his life as he bags the first ever interview with a dreaded don.
Review: To make a satire on Dawood Ibrahim is a brave effort, no doubt. But is it a successful effort? Barely.
Arnab Ghosh (Sunil Grover) is a table-thumping, loud-mouthed journalist modelled after a popular prime time news anchor. His antics, though they generate ratings, fail to amuse the channel boss, who relegates him to a less important slot as the host of a cooking show. Disturbed by the demotion and with a heavily pregnant wife (Anjana Sukhani), he decides to go for the big kill – an interview with the dreaded don D (Zakir Hussain). He lures the don out to grant him an interview and accompanies a fashion writer (Dipannita Sharma) and his two-man crew to Pakistan.
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For a film that is a satirical take on news channels, it gets its facts askew for comedy’s sake, which is granted. Still, the TV channel shenanigans of Arnab are downplayed – you only see one scene in the studio, which is loud, forced and not really funny. There are funnier skits online. The first half is a weak build-up to the interview with D, which makes up the rest of the film. While the dialogue is clever in the interview, where D is seen as a masterful manipulator, it does drag and you find your attention wavering. Yet the climax does take you by surprise.
Sunil Grover swerves between playing Arnab and an SRK lookalike. Anjana Sukhani, as the pregnant-yet-bashful wife Parul, gives a lazy performance. Dipannita Sharma’s character exists; it seems, purely for the sake of misogynistic jokes. Zakir Hussain as D and Pankaj Tripathi who plays his sidekick Girdhari, perform brilliantly. Tripathi steals the show with his spot-on comic timing. You wish he had a bigger role.
It could have been good film, but the undoing of Coffee With D is its post-production. The film is let down by shoddy editing and a bad dubbing job where entire sentences are muted and out of sync. A story that has potential is ruined by poor execution that distracts you from the plot.