Review: NOOR

Noor is So Superficial, It Gives Veneer An Inferiority Complex

1.5 stars

Mini Review:

A young journalist is stuck doing fluff interviews and she wants to meaningful work. But she has much to learn, and when she stumbles on a great story, she shares it with a boyfriend who uses the story without any corroboration. The consequences aren’t great, but then she learns a valuable lesson. Alas, the movie is so poorly researched and journalists will have a great laugh.

Main Review:

Noor, played by Sonakshi Sinha with all the earnestness she can muster, but the script is so badly researched, so superficial, it gives journalists a bad name. Certainly no journalist, even when a trainee would behave the way Noor does at a job.

She is judgemental about everything and looks at things in an extremely negative way. It reflects in her work and as audience you wish someone would shake her up or slap her, at least. But the film takes its own sweet time to teach a wannabe serious journalist a hard lesson. We see her flitting from a pub to a discotheque to an art gallery with her two best friends Zara (Shibani Dandekar) and Saad (Kanan Gill).

She even falls in love with an ex CNN photographer Ayan Banerjee (Purab Kohli) and Noor’s little complaints about her job are forgotten when she meets him at coffee shops and pubs and then at his hotel room. Of course she shares the story she is working on with the lad, and he predictably turns out to be a cad, and steals the story and broadcasts it to the world.

The story turns out to be sensational, but without any corroboration, without proof it dies a natural death. Noor is unhappy that her editor (played, again, in all earnestness by Manish Choudhary) made her wait for ‘her story’ and ruined an opportunity to be the one who ‘broke news’

But the script fails to explain to Noor that you cannot just publish any story, you need to find more proof, more evidence that the ‘scam’ is widespread. Did the scriptwriter not watch the Oscar winning film about investigative journalism called ‘Spotlight’?

Noor’s best friend Saad whisks her off to London because she’s heartbroken over Ayan’s betrayal, and then she comes back and in one viral video breaks the net. Her editor is happy, she is happy, offers her carte blanche and fabulous real estate to start a new newspaper and her best friend proposes to her like it were some storybook romance. Why? Because no girl is complete without a man in her life. Independence and being great at her work are not enough to offer happiness.

The film is like a fancy Vanilla Latte you ordered that was brought to you with only foam and no coffee…

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)