Seconds before the intermission in No One Killed Jessica, the title — and the newspaper headline which set off the idea for the film —makes a cameo. By then, I thought the film was near done. How wrong.

Jessica is a typical against-the-corrupt-system drama flaunting stiff, unmotivated dialogues. The film is based on the real-life murder of Jessica Lall, a trial that took a lot of nose dives and dead ends with an eventual happy ending some eight years later thanks to constant media badgering. This is a tale of sensationalism done right.

It all begins with a loud, gratuitous and overlong history lesson narrated by Meera Gaity (Rani Mukherjee), appropriately thought for but eventually ill-fitting the role.

Meera is an emblematic television newshound at the peak of her vertically inclined career. She’s arrogant, smokes, bullies and ultimately has her way with the story. And she routinely calls herself a “bitch” in every other scene; at one point her house servant dubs the gaali in Hindi for our convenience. In an early scene, Meera, just out of Kargil, shuts up a loud-mouthed jerk on a flight with a big, fat, mispronounced cuss word.

In the first half of the film, Meera is kept to an occasional world-shattering crisis or a walk through where she growls at the younger set of reporters. She isn’t interested in Jessica’s case simply because she sees no personal interest. During that time, the focus is on Sabrina (Vidya Balan), Jessica’s elder, mousy sister who hides behind big, unfashionable specs.

Sabrina is in a fix. She has to run down Jessica’s eyewitness to make sure they stick to their testimony and then contend with an unchallenging, simple father (Yogendra Tikku) and her constantly hollering mother (Geeta Sudan).

Jessica was murdered by a politician’s son over a drink he couldn’t get in front of 300 witnesses. It sounds like an open-and-shut case, but then think again (we wouldn’t have this film if it were that easy). Eyewitnesses are bought at a crore rupees each. Those who do nod in favour of justice squirm away at the trial.

The trial itself is a mockery pulled off in the most ludicrous fashion. The problem is that the director didn’t mean it to be ludicrous; or uninspiring.

For an independent-minded Bollywood production, primed as a film with a noteworthy message (and possibly film fraternity awards) one is bound to ask a few, basic proverbial questions: why are the characters so blandly written? Why don’t we feel any human connection? What makes Meera or Sabrina tick? Amidst the cross-cutting narrative, and a screenplay that tries too hard, we never get to know that answer. Everything is self-evident, automatic and unappealing. Almost as if it is willed to happen at the behest of the screenwriter.

Balan, her voice unemotional and monotone with hair neatly combed into a clip, understands Sabrina well. Like Mukerjee, her scintillating talent is kept in check by direction.

No One Killed Jessica is directed and written by Raj Kumar Gupta, whose last film, Aamir, was about an unwilling NRI (Rajeev Khandelwal) who is blackmailed into planting a bomb that leads to intersect-violence.

For Jessica, Gupta gets overwhelmed by the orthodoxy of independent cinema. He shoulder-mounts the camera, colour-grades his film in blue and green at night and inserts long, pointless passages of wearisome, self-gratifying narrations that are coupled with longer corridors walk-throughs — a professed sign that this is not a commercial film.

At the end of the film, we see a long, dwindling setup that has the awaam, who helped re-Marshall the case back into the court, remembering Jessica. How much more clichéd can it get? Oh wait, we see Jessica, happy in her carefree days, smiling at the camera as an after-thought.

Released by UTV Spotboy and produced by Ronnie Screwvala, No One Killed Jessica features cussing and the power of sansani-powered media dogging the right story for a change.