Director Sudha Kongara's Sarfira, a Hindi-language remake of her own Tamil Amazon Original movie Soorarai Pottru (2020), stars Akshay Kumar, and – if you're familiar with his filmography over the past decade – the film couldn't be more tailored to his sensibilities if it tried.
Kumar, who also co-produces the film, plays Vir, an Air Force dropout who dreams of running his own low-cost airline.
If you weren't aware that this is an underdog story, Kongara and co-writer Shalini Ushadevi spare no effort reminding its viewers from the very first scene, which features a botched landing and two injured pilots.
For context, we're thrown back a couple of years to establish the protagonist of this story: an angry, unemployed man with staunch principles whose pitch for a low-cost airline has been rejected multiple times by various investors.
And if you missed that bit the first time, the movie makes it a point to repeat it many times in the same scene. For better or worse, this is the kind of tone viewers would get every second of Sarfira's 155-minute runtime. None of the characters speak to each other as much as they talk at each other – very loudly, almost like they're competing with G V Prakash Kumar's equally loud soundtrack.
This is an unsurprising trademark of the film's director, an arguable success in her 2016 sports drama Saala Khadoos, in which the protagonists' fast-loud-and-snappy rendezvous felt thematically appropriate to the tone set in the world of competitive boxing. Here, the stylistically heavy-handed approach doesn't only feel jarring, it's also a significant detriment to the material on hand.
But it is precisely the type of overwhelming writing made for Kumar and Kumar only. Almost every scene he features in – practically 99.9 per cent of the film – has him loudly monologuing about the class divide, his dream of a low-cost airline and the number of investors who closed their doors in his face.
To his credit, he unfailingly repeats a mixture of these lines, but it does get admittedly tiring knowing how morally infallible the protagonist is.
Another side effect of viewers being constantly inundated by what one can only call a hagiography is the amount of brilliant character work its narrative throws on the back burner. Radhika Madan, who plays Vir's wife Rani, is incredible and shines in every scene, but she feels more like a filler character in the film's second act.
She's not alone here – most of the film's character actors, who boast an otherwise stacked filmography in addition to having oodles of talent, just exist as stereotypes. Seema Biswas (Funny Boy) is the doting mother, Paresh Rawal (Sharmaji Namkeen) is your unfriendly neighbourhood Disney villain, Prakash Belawadi (Pathaan) is a shrewd venture capitalist and Iravati Harshe Mayadev (Article 370) plays a commoner-journo – all equally excellent, but also similarly underutilised.
Based on G R Gopinath's English-language memoir Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey – in itself, its author's account of his journey to founding India's first low-cost airline meant for hard-to-reach locations across the country – Sarfira could have been much, much more.
What it is now, unfortunately, is an overwhelmingly loud and long drama that is less movie and more a platform for Kumar's unceasing, unrelenting presence that overstays its welcome way before the first act ends.
This one's exclusively for Kumar's die-hards. For the rest, just pick up the book.
