Vishal Mishra’s movie, Coffee With D features Sunil Grover in the lead role as a journalist, Arnab Ghosh, who is demoted from a top news journalist to a host in a cookery show. He then decides to come back in style by interviewing the most dreaded don, Dawood Ibrahim (Zakir Hussain). He schedules a meet with him through D’s right-hand man (Pankaj Tripathi), and goes to Pakistan to meet Dawood. To his surprise, D agrees for the interview and the story takes a funny turn. The story is not very appealing, and the over-flooding of satirical dialogues make it quite boring. Almost everyone has given a lazy performance and Sunil Grover tries to impress the audience with a mix of Shahrukh Khan and Arnab Goswami’s style, and he fails in all the departments. The story had a potential to excel, but it’s the best if you avoid watching it and enjoy your weekend elsewhere.

The film, which sounds promising, starts to falter right after the opening credits. It begins as a satire and then tries to acquire the tone of a serious debate and then keeps oscillating between two extremes. By now, you must have remembered Tere Bin Laden (2010). Only you have to imagine it sans its humour and amazingly spontaneous actors. And then enters the duo of Zakir Hussain and his close associate, Girdhari Secular (Pankaj Tripathi), who take the lethargy several notches higher. From their names to dialogues, the writers have not left anything to chance. They grab us by the neck and feed us their ‘humour’. However, inside the dark cinema hall, you may afford to not laugh. Sunil Grover provides a sensible touch to his Arnab, but fails miserably at humour, something he is really good at. Anjana Sukhani is at more ease than him. A caricatured D and his antics, coupled with bad sound designing, make Coffee With D end nowhere close to a fun film it could have been.

Isn't it amazing what a slew of talented actors can do to an outrageous idea? Think of Coffee With D as a boys' day out with Dawood, and you will actually enjoy the implausible goings on. This is a what-if idea carried to an extreme of satirical eventuality but laced with humour and saved from a catastrophic plunge to inanity by actors who know how to hold the dialogues even the words run all over the place. Coffee With D suffers from a fundamental flaw. It presumes that a film about a clash between 'Dawood' and 'Arnab' (the Gangster and the Newshound) would generate instant drama. I wish these actors had more in the plot to chew on. The story is an one liner. Once 'Arnab' decides to get 'D' for an interview the film flounders with the pacing. The second-half is devoted entirely to the one-on-one between the dreaded gangster and the aggressive newshound. What could have been a hard-hitting interface is drastically diluted with words and sentences beeped out by the censor. This is a satire that is meant to offend none. It steers miraculously clear of vulgarity while negotiating a bumpy ride from Mumbai to Karachi.

A celebrity TV anchor called Arnab who thumps the table and shouts down a studio guest has vanished from prime time in real life, much to the dismay of those who think news television should be non-stop `tamasha’. If you’re missing him madly, I would have suggested you check out a me-too copy in Coffee With D, also helpfully called Arnab (Sunil Grover). D, for those who came in late, is the spiffy short from for Don Dawood (Zakir Hussain) who is Arnab’s coveted coffee date. The idea is to interview the guy responsible for all kinds of dark deeds– from match fixing to shoot-outs and kidnap-ransom-murders in India– who operates from a neighbouring country. It is also to lampoon the TRP hungry TV industry, whose bosses will do anything to get those eyeballs, even if it is most outlandish. If a mobster sitting across a table can give gyaan to whoever cares to listen, why not? And the idea had potential. But when you run out of a plot within a few minutes of your opening, you have no idea of production values, and when the execution is beyond awful, all you want to do is to run. Except the film is un-sittable through: I did it so you wouldn’t have to, and I demand, in return, a splendid villa somewhere across the border and a box full of cigars. Grover, who is a well-known TV artist, is the only one who seems serious about this enterprise. Everyone else seems in on the joke.

To make a satire on Dawood Ibrahim is a brave effort, no doubt. But is it a successful effort? Barely. 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. 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.