Thick melodrama keeps film from being glorified Law & Order: New Delhi.
In the film No One Killed Jessica, written and directed by Raj Kumar Gupta, thick and creamy melodrama is heaped on top of an often heavy-handed courtroom potboiler to create a slightly uneven film that still manages to entertain due in large part to a kinetic visual energy and an engaging story.
Vidya Balan stars as Sabrina, a bookish young woman whose sister is slain during a heated argument at a popular nightclub. The murder of Jessica, Sabrina’s sister played by Myra Karn, quickly becomes the center of a national media storm when it’s discovered the man who shot the young model is the son of a powerful politician. As the trial moves through court, rampant corruption keeps Jessica’s family from seeing justice — as the killer and the two friends who goaded him on are acquitted.
It becomes up to crusading reporter Meera Gaity (Rani Mukerji) to lead an investigation that can not only prove the identity of Jessica’s murderers but also provide a much-needed wake-up call to New Delhi’s court system.
The film, which features characters that speak in a variety of different languages including Hindi and English, is neatly divided into two, slightly uneven chapters. The first half of the film, which deals with the courtroom drama that plays out following Jessica’s death, never quite rises above Law and Order rerun material. Despite strong performances from Balan and Rajeesh Sharma as a sympathetic investigator, the movie’s first act plods along laboriously as it lays out a clear picture of a corrupt legal system where both sides of a case are expected to bid for witnesses’ testimony.
As the film shifts into it’s second half, though, a spirited performance by Mukerji as Meera, the Lois Lane of New Delhi reporters, helps pick up the film’s pace. Meera’s methodical, if slightly unrealistic, exposing of the corruptions that plagued Jessica’s murder trial have all the trappings of a good John Grisham novel.
No One Killed Jessica is a film that’s clearly hoping to be a crowd pleaser. A movie about a country united in disgust over political misdeeds, the film does not hold back in providing a rousing anthem for people to fall into pace behind. Inspired by true events, the film’s story is a slightly dim-witted, non-supernatural version of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones. The film follows a pretty familiar structure — not leaving a lot of surprises to the seasoned moviegoer. What separates the film from flat-out filmmaking complacency, though, is some great, tear-stained melodrama seemingly manufactured out of pure, distilled reruns of Touched by an Angel and network television magazine programs such as Dateline NBC.
As nearly a decade passes while the trial is slowly pushed through the New Delhi legal system like a piece of gum through a digestive tract, Sabrina goes from a bright-eyed crusader of justice — willing to dedicate her entire waking life to sending her sister’s killers to jail — to a woman who has actually grown bitter towards her dead sister and angry at the young life she has thrown away in pursuit of the unattainable. Sabrina looses her faith in justice and Balan nicely captures the loss in her performance’s evolution.
Despite a pretty methodical, slow-paced story, No One Killed Jessica is shot with a high-spirited style — picture a Michael Bay-directed crime procedural show. By using hand-held cameras, various shutter speeds and music video editing techniques, and a throbbing Indian pop soundtrack by Amit Trivedi, the film has no problem keeping audiences’ attention intact through the two-plus hour running time.
No One Killed Jessica is a pretty mainstream export from India that will appeal to crime drama movie fans that maybe aren’t too familiar with Bollywood cinema thanks to an easily relatable story, high-quality soap opera-esque acting and nicely maintained energy throughout the film. It’s not the best representation of Indian film the curious could watch but for those looking for good old fashioned entertainment — the kind that will leave them with full hearts if slightly hungry minds — there’s a lot worse films one could watch.
Director: Raj Kumar Gupta
Notable Cast: Vidya Balan, Rani Mukerji, Neil Bhoopalam and Rajesh Sharma
Writer(s): Raj Kumar Gupta
