Akshay Kumar Can Neither Take Off nor Land This Biopic

Director: Sudha KongaraWriters: Sudha Kongara, Shalini Ushadevi, Pooja TolaniCast: Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, Radhika Madan, Seema Biswas, Prakash BelawadiDuration: 155 minsAvailable in: Theatres The journey of an entrepreneur isn’t naturally cinematic. Such stories don’t resemble stories. There’s a lot of trying, waiting, thinking, failing, speaking, fretting and negotiating. There’s no visual grammar; the drama is largely silent, slow-burning and bureaucratic. Consequently, most Indian films about entrepreneurship tend to overcompensate in treatment and tone. They are designed to sell, not tell. Complex lives are reduced to emotional binaries. The narrative becomes non-linear; scenes become simplistic; obstacles are literalised; heroes are sabotaged. Imagine the training montages from sports dramas – where years of practice and repetitions are condensed into one punchy sequence – except the whole film is that montage here. Some, like Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009) or Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), do this well. They trust the inherent personality of the hustle. But a majority of these movies – like the recent Srikanth (2024) and now, Sarfira – are more body than soul. Every scene looks like an advertisement made to energise a product they don’t trust enough. Sudha Kongara’s Tamil film Soorarai Pottru (2020), of which Sarfira is a Hindi remake, falls in the same category. Loosely based on the memoir of Air Deccan founder G.R. Gopinath, it revolves around a former Indian Air Force (IAF) officer who overcomes multiple hurdles to start India’s first low-cost airline. His dream – to make air travel affordable to all Indians – features class-barrier clichés galore. Like a melodramatic backstory about how expensive flight tickets prevented him from seeing his dying father. Like an elitist rival (Paresh Rawal) who uses sanitiser after shaking working-class hands or fires employees for using the same washroom. Or like naysayers who scoff at the hero every time he breathes so that we know he’s an underdog. But the original film has superstar Suriya in fine form. It has a headstrong female presence in Aparna Balamurali, whose ‘supporting role’ as the wife challenges the man’s main character energy; their marriage has not one but two dreamers. Sarfira, though, inherits the flaws of Soorarai Pottru (not least Rawal’s one-note performance) and dilutes its strengths.