“Who are the rich to tell us what we should want!” A truer sentiment, there cannot be, right? And least expected, it was for me to hear that in a film. B-u-t, for a film that claims to be speaking for the masses, it’s sad that Sarfira decides that the masses like loud melodrama. You know the kind in which the background music is music-ing a bit too much, the drama, drama-ing you to the brink of boredom and then beyond.

Their accents are uneven and body language too performative.

That’s par for the game for an Akshay Kumar film, you say. I know-I know. I just wish it wasn’t for this story. A common man from a small, Indian village dreams of building a low-cost airline company. He feels this from his gut and puts in all his might and more to make it happen. The movie, though, makes a hotch-potch of it.

To begin with it goes back and forth in time, without there being an real reason to do so. Then it is uneven in its telling. For instance, it spends too much time on some scenes that don’t serve the film like the security check-up that Vir (Akshay Kumar) goes through. Then there are important scenes that lose impact because they are stretched out a little too long—like the desperation of a man trying to reach his village from a city.

To this weird choices in what makes it to the film and how much time it deserve, add a whole load of song-and-dance sequences. They are abruptly placed and even if you accept that they are needed to keep us interested, you cannot shake off the feeling that they broke the flow.

Maybe all these things are because the makers know that they are going to stick to just one note…Vir truly believes in his cause and there are a bunch of bad guys out to make sure he doesn’t achieve it. It is believable, the extent to which businessmen and bureaucrats can control an industry such as aviation. That even the best interests and interventions of politics cannot stop business is a remarkable side-comment. Yet, you get that gist even by watching the trailer.

Sure, the fault here lies with marketing. It annoys me no end that everything the film contains is known to you in the first two minutes of information you consume about the film. And don’t even get me started about the longer trailers.

All-in-all, you end up spending 2.5 hours and barely learning anything new or being entertained. Because, despite sharing a decent chemistry, Akshay Kumar and Radhikka Madan are not convincing you that they are poor people from a village…na-a! Their accents are uneven and body language too performative.

the background music is music-ing a bit too much, the drama, drama-ing you to the brink of boredom and then beyond.

This is sad because all they had to do was look at the supportive cast around them—Seema Biswas, not Paresh Rawal, nor Prakash Balewadi. Rawal plays a caricature of a villain and Balewadi’s dialogue delivery is unexpectedly jarring. While Biswas is loud, which seems like a directorial call, she is convincing.

Oh! That seems like a metaphor for the film! Take a good quality base and dial up the volume—figuratively and literally.

– meeta, a part of the audience