Like the cheap tabloids that routinely peddled salacious tidbits of her alleged private life, this film too is a hack job.

Diana is an inexplicably bland portrait of an extraordinarily dramatic life. It takes some talent to make Lady Di boring.

A spectacularly misjudged biopic about the late Princess of Wales, Diana spans the last two years of her life leading up to the car crash in which she died. The atrocious script is infinitely quotable, dropping as it does clunker after clunker.

If you are fine with seeing Diana as the ‘needy’ woman solely looking for love, living in suffocating secrecy, you may like the film. If you expect to revisit the aura of mystery surrounding her, you will be disappointed.

A huge royal mess, Diana is easily one of the worst biographical work brought alive on the big screen. Diana’s private life has ample fodder to make a Sidney Sheldon book set, but a film based on her life neither engages us on a cerebral level, nor titillates with shades of gossip! Instead it becomes a sort of parody demeaning and mutilating every little memory we have of one of the ‘princess of hearts’.

Naomi Watts does her bit but falls short in portraying someone as strong and popular as Diana. All credit goes to the hair and makeup department who give her the perfect look. Diana is not a bad film but the problem is the Princess of Wales deserves a lot better.

The dialogues are not particularly sparkling and the romance may seem a bit trite, since there is no concrete evidence of how exactly it unfolded. Her differences with Prince Charles and her skirmishes with the Royal family are completed avoided, but the way the story unfolds, I didn’t miss that. One way to savour this film is to enjoy what is being served rather than look out for what is missing. Naomi Watts in the lead role has expectedly done good job. Even though you might hear mixed views about the film, I suggest you see it for yourself and decide.

The script itself acts as a ruthless stalker, uneasy with its own probing. It does little to convey either the perfection or imperfection of its subject. Unfortunately, it does not reveal anything about the enigmatic Diana, but manages instead to portray her as a tepidly manipulative and scheming woman, who fed the media with photographs taken with Dodi Fayed.

German filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel’s biopic Diana takes the basic facts of the British royal’s post-divorce years, puts them through the dry-cleaner and then whips them on the washing stone to make sure that no blemishes or stains survive.