Bad Newz: Vicky Kaushal Does The Heavy Lifting In This Tedious Watch

VICKY KAUSHAL IS A PROBLEM. The actor has such a striking screen presence and control over craft, and he is so watchable overall that he tends to eclipse everything else. He can elevate a middling scene and make an otherwise dull line sing. Worse, he transforms Instagram reels from a stale algorithm mess to a breathing entity. When he dances, the act is so effortless that it feels like he is gliding on water, and for a while, he persuaded me to believe that Bad Newz, his latest film, is likeable, funny and decent. 

I will not lie. I laughed every time he was on screen. I let out a chuckle (even) when the grating background score boomed with the name of his character, Akhil Chaddha, a good-for-nothing West Delhi guy, and he appeared with a manicured hairstyle that is reminiscent of every man in Delhi. There is a scene where Akhil, who suffers from nomophobia, runs to a mobile store after losing his phone and although breathless, ends up conveying to the staff that he needs a new phone by doing a bizarre dance number on Govinda and Karisma Kapoor’s song, 'What Is Mobile Number.' On paper, this is too silly to work but it did remind me of another scene from Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016) where a heartbroken Ranbir Kapoor takes a flower pot and beats his chest as if there is nothing there. Notwithstanding the difference in tonality, both these excessive moments rely entirely on the actors performing them and speak volumes about how compelling they are.

But there is also so much heavy-lifting Kaushal can do in a Dharma film that turns out to be the most Dharma film. Which is to say Bad Newz is dotted with Punjabi songs, designed with a gaudy aesthetic and unfolds with one self-referencing after another. When two men fight over a girl, a series of comparisons from Hindi films come up that stops right when one tells the other that he is not a loser like Vicky Kaushal’s character from Manmarziyaan. The person this is being told to is Vicky Kaushal, who retaliates. In another instance, Kaushal’s character guards a Katrina Kaif poster with his life when someone threatens to tear it off. In yet another, the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai wedding song 'Saajan ji Ghar Aaye' scores the moment when a girl comes back to her maternal house after fighting with her husband.

Everything in Bad Newz is designed for laughs, even at the expense of the central theme. Directed by Anand Tiwari (who reunites with Kaushal after Love per Square Foot in 2018), the outing revolves around a case of heteropaternal superfecundation, a rare case in which a woman can get pregnant with the sperm of two men. Which is to say, there can be two fathers and one mother. And so it happens. Saloni Bagga (Triptii Dimri) is a chef in Delhi. She sees Akhil Chaddha at a wedding and two songs later, they fall in love, get married and fly to Europe for their honeymoon (one must mention an outlandish transition here of a broken bed and an aeroplane taking off). Chaddha leans close to Rocky Randhawa (Ishita Moitra is a co-writer on both Bad Newz and Johar’s 2023 outing Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani). He is loud, brash, self-involved and silly. He is also tied to his mother (the wonderful Sheeba Chaddha) a little too much and soon Saloni realises she hurried into things. To repair the damage, she resorts to more haste. She goes to Mussoorie, joins a hotel as a chef and embarks on a new chapter. 

Another problem soon presents itself. The hotel owner Gurbir Pannu (Ammy Virk with a perpetual straight face), a nice, Sikh man is besotted with her. He is smart, quiet and everything her ex-husband is not. One night Saloni is told that Akhil has moved on and then she does what most sensible people do: she gets drunk, pulls him to bed and has sex (the scene is uncomfortable to watch because he keeps protesting to take it slow). On cue, Akhil arrives the same day at Mussoorie to ask for forgiveness. They have sex and Saloni finds out she is pregnant. 

To its credit, Bad Newz sidesteps the misogyny that such a setting provokes. None of the two men shame Saloni, her parents don’t get involved till much later and it appears that she has the agency to take the call about her pregnancy and who the father should be. Everything happens at a breakneck speed and it works till it doesn’t. The problem arrives when the film runs out of pop-culture references to hide behind and is forced to stand on its feet. What is Bad Newz when it is not evoking Mohabbatein, Kabir Singh and Duplicate? It is a tedious watch about two men, one alpha and one beta, fighting over a pregnant girl while she is relegated to the margins.

The writers of the film (Moitra and Tarun Dudeja) are so taken by the premise and the sea of nostalgia they can draw from that they lose sight of the plot. So preoccupied are they to make jokes that they fill most of the bloated runtime with silly banter between the two men that grudgingly works only when Kaushal is on screen. Saloni is reduced to being a referee to this Tom and Jerry contest. Dimri is constantly watchable but she is a misfit for a role like this that demands more flair and less diffidence. Her character also has no sense of self and is deemed ambitious only because she pines for some obscure Meraki star (a Karol Bagh version of Michelin Star). One must mention that it is always good to see Naveen Kaushik hamming it up as the unrelenting boss in every enterprise. 

The increasing Newz franchise (it started with Good Newwz in 2019) rests on women going through gynaecological complications so that the men turn more sensible. Two films down and it is already becoming less about the women in labour and more about the labour of men. If there is a third film, the focus ought to shift somewhere which does not look like a baby bump.