Tasteless affair

Johnson Thomas

A controversy-spinning spoof on a what-if premise might whet your appetite for a bit but if there’s no bite in it, then it’s all a lost cause. ‘Coffee with D’ amounts to something like that. 

Primetime News anchor Arnab Ghosh (Varun Grover) has humiliated his last guest, a minister from the government and he has to pay for it by shifting portfolios to a cookery slot. Neha (Dipannita Sharma) the Boss man Mr Roy’s (Rajesh Sharma) favourite has been moved up the rung, so-to-speak. A chance conversation with his pregnant and happily immersed-in-crime-patrol wife (Anjana Sukhani) lends Arnab a probable big idea on how to go about regaining lost TRP’s and aid the dying channel.

But at first he has to get the D (Zakir Hussain gunning for style rather than menace) in the picture, interested. So demeaning inferences and video jabs about his incriminating past, piques D’s interest and he finally agrees to a face-off with the most-feared TV news anchor of the decade. Who’s gonna win the battle which is slated to be held at the D’s hideout in Karachi? 

No prizes for guessing who Arnab Ghosh is fashioned on but the problem here is not the intent, it’s the feeble, unsavory depiction of the real thing. There’s a major problem with the screenplay, which is underwritten and doesn’t quite make it to humorous at any point. The performances too are horribly mistimed. Other than the big idea that’s elaborated on in the denouement, there’s really nothing here worthy enough of getting anybody’s goat. The insipid, uninteresting nature of the telling is more an embarrassment to the filmmaker than to the apportioned real-life characters it hopes to roast.

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