The legendary Ram Gopal Varma is back in form with his latest offering – Rann. Rann (meaning battle) is a Bollywood film that delves into the highly competitive world of television news reporting in India, putting the spotlight on the media industry’s insatiable appetite for advertisers and viewers.

The film stars Amitabh Bachchan, Sudeep, Ritesh Deshmukh, Mohnish Behl, and Paresh Rawal, in the lead roles. Other characters in the movie are portrayed by Rajat Kapoor, Rajpal Yadav, Gul Panag, Suchitra Krishnamurthy, and Neetu Chandra.

Rann tells the story of Vijay Harshvardhan Malik (played by Amitabh Bachchan), a hard-hitting journalist who believes in core journalistic ethics, who runs a news channel called India 24/7. India 24/7 relays only news and believes that it has a duty towards its viewers to not be biased and hence, it does not accept favours (such as money) to sell stories as news.

Naturally it begins to lose the TRP race to its rival channel called Headlines 24, run by Amrish Kakkar (played by Mohnish Behl) that excels in sensationalism. Obviously, Jai Malik (played by Sudeep) the media baron’s ambitious son is not at all happy with his father’s journalistic values and ethics and is only concerned about TRP.

Thus he tries to win the TRP war by teaming up with a corrupt politician, Mohan Pandey [Paresh Rawal], who decides to use the channel to his advantage by using Vijay’s son-in-law Navin [Rajat Kapoor]. Pandey aspires to be the Prime Minister and indulges in a vicious campaign against his political opponent and hence, he offers huge amounts of money to Jai, in return of using his channel as his political party’s mouthpiece.

What happens after Jai accepts Pandey’s proposal is what makes up the rest of the story. I have to admit that I haven’t seen such a hard-hitting movie since Mani Ratnam’s Yuva! This movie is extra-ordinary. Of course don’t go into the cinema hall looking forward to learn something new, because it does not offer any. All the movie does is reiterate what we already know, but in a hard-hitting in-your-face fashion.

Performances by all the actors and actresses in the movie is excellent. The direction is slick and the movie plot is brilliant. I would easily give the movie a 4 out of 5. Definitely, a must-watch!