VIVEK KUMAR DUBEY

All through Raj Mehta’s Good Newwz, Kareena Kapoor seems to be demanding: 'Give me a film more worthy of my magnificence!' While everyone else in Good Newwz gets to say their share of punchlines, Kareena gets none. Nor is she allowed any obvious tomfoolery. In a film where everyone else alternates between parading their comic chops and trying to knock you down with the force of their sentimental acting, Kareena’s is a performance of more than just surface pleasures. She gives her character of Deepti Batra, a sense of the Self-same, a persistence of identity. In a movie environment of every person attempting to out-zany the other, it takes an actor with some grasp of her own inwardness to connect her character’s complex realities and modes of behaviour, to a single consciousness. When Kareena’s Deepti Batra, with faux moony eyes, welcomes her husband Varun (Akshay Kumar) home, her actions perfectly correspond to that of a film journalist with self-esteem issues (which is her professional reality). The Deepti Batra, who threatens to sue the doctor responsible for goofing up her IVF implant, is the same Deepti Batra who later responds to her mother-in-law’s ill-timed cutesiness with a 'Shut up, mom!'