Sarfira movie review: Akshay Kumar stars in creaky melodrama that’ll remind you of a 60s weepie

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From here on, you get the two strands that this film is made up of: where emotions are ratcheted to the point of no return (Vir’s father declaiming; Vir’s mother weeping), and the relatively quieter moments when aviation king Paresh Goswami (Paresh Rawal) creates one roadblock after another for our Vir, who manages a quick stint in the Army before switching to full-time entrepreneurship, with all its challenges. How do you conquer the skies when you start from nothing?

In the original, Suriya managed to create some endearing moments with his high-spirited partner who takes her own sweet time saying yes to him. Here, it’s hard to look past the clear age-difference between the two, and this happens not just in Akshay’s scenes with Radhika Madan, but with his two partners, Army mates who were an intrinsic part of the team which finally launched Deccan Air. He looks older than everyone else around him, except when he is facing off with his chief adversary Paresh Rawal, who manages to come off every bit as vile and classist-casteist in this reprise as he was in the original.

Madan doesn’t do too badly as an independent-minded Marathi mulgi who can teach a thing or two to her old man (you only wish she would stop speaking between her teeth), and the script takes care to insert her into as many scenes as it can. But it fails when it comes to the two men who were his closest partners and companions on the journey to create the airline: ‘Sarfira’ keeps them in the background, and they only come into their own, just a bit, towards the end. The excellent Seema Biswas, playing Akshay’s mother, is reduced to a wailing Bollywood maa; Belawadi is oily to the right degree, but is entirely forgotten after his short arc.

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This is what happens when the film is mainly interested in fronting its hero. It isn’t as if Akshay Kumar, who is in practically every frame of the film, is actively terrible, but there really isn’t a single thing he does here that he hasn’t done before. Whether he is fighting for the rights of his beloved villagers (who dreamt up that dreadful hairstyle?), or standing up to his harsh Army superior, or ‘maro-ing thumkas’ with Madan (and no, we’re not being ageist, but we can’t help but cringe at the obvious age difference), it is Akshay once again playing Akshay the Everyman who will fix Everything.

The nicest part of the film, like in the original, are the ordinary folk who come out of the first flight, their faces lit-up and beaming. That’s what you take away from this loose adaptation of G R Gopinath’s memoir ‘Simply Fly : A Deccan Odyssey’, as well as the freeze frames of Gopinath and his fellow pioneers who started out with an impossible dream, and turned it into reality.

Sarfira
Director – Sudha Kongara
Cast – Akshay Kumar, Radhika Madan, Paresh Rawal, Seema Biswas, Prakash Belawadi, Anil Charanjeett, Rahul Vohra, Irvati Harshe, Gurpal Singh
Rating – 2/5