Sarfira Review: Akshay Kumar Can Neither Take Off nor Land This Biopic

Director: Sudha Kongara
Writers: Sudha Kongara, Shalini Ushadevi, Pooja Tolani
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, Radhika Madan, Seema Biswas, Prakash Belawadi

Duration: 155 mins

Available 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. 

Enter: Akshay Kumar

For starters, Sarfira (meaning “mad”) can’t resist the Akshay-Kumar-isation of the film. That ‘social saviour’ syndrome reserved for his characters emerges in the smallest of tweaks. For instance, a scene where the man crashes former president Abdul Kalam’s media interview to ask for help is adapted into a scene where he crashes the president’s speech at a girls’ school and publicly airs his plea for help. The gendered statement of their marriage – where the woman’s business runs the household; where she taunts her husband for losing hope – is dialled down here. Even in a scene where he swallows his male ego and requests her for money, Kumar’s Vir Mhatre somehow makes it look like he is the hero for being humble enough to break stereotypes. (In a Tamil film, this is a big deal, but in Sarfira it’s performative). Never mind that she lovingly scolds him for considering it a “loan”. When Vir loses his cool, Kumar amplifies it so hard that it feels like the film wants us to recognise how messy he is willing to get. It doesn’t help that Kumar is shot from angles where he almost never looks like he’s making eye contact with the characters he talks to. When Vir goes looking for his wife after a spat, there is token integration: He enters a mosque, immerses himself in Sufism and suddenly we notice a Muslim locality, never to be seen again in the film.

That’s another problem with the film. Soorarai Pottru was at least comfortable with its cultural identity – a Tamil drama about Tamil people looking to make an India-sized dent in aviation. Even the caricatures were in good faith. But Sarfira is awkward with the cultural translation – a Hindi drama about small-town Maharashtrian characters struggling in Mumbai. The appropriation is strong. The only Catholic character ends every line with “man”. Vir keeps sprinkling his exchanges with Marathi terms, which made me miss the glory days of Rawal and Kumar in Hera Pheri (2000). 

A Silver Lining Named Radhika Madan

The core setting is touristy. Most of the indoor scenes – meetings, DGCA offices, government cabins, speeches – seem to be shot in different spaces of St. Xavier’s College. A few semi-outdoor scenes are at Sophia College. While these are often logistical choices driven by budget and schedules, it robs the story of a sense of place and time (not once does it feel like the early 2000s, despite the nostalgia of airline ticket booklets and cash counters). I don’t expect authenticity, but a film about business can’t afford to be geographically inert. There are some superficial improvements, like the airplane sequences which, in the original, were sketchy at best. At one point, a flight turning back to its destination actually looked like it was reversing mid-air. 

Radhika Madan’s performance is one of the few silver linings in this unimaginative remake. It’s not a rendition of Balamurali’s turn and it’s not even limited to the agency of her character. Watching her is like watching a separate, more fascinating movie about a budding female entrepreneur who makes her suitor wait three years to marry her – on her own terms. She runs a bakery in a big city (a ‘breadwinner’ in the truest sense), supporting the family financially without really existing in the shadows. I suppose all of this is implied through Madan’s easy relationship with the camera, which transcends the age gap of their marriage to culminate in symbiotic companionship. I also like the perseverance of the narrative itself: Vir keeps coming up against a wall, and there’s never a doubt that he’s a little crazy to continue despite a rigged system. A little more about why Vir left the IAF, or something about his serial entrepreneurship and restless ambition, might have aided the furious rhythm of this film. But his aspirations remain too readymade, as if he woke up one day and decided to become a philanthrope for those like him.  

Ultimately, it’s the social gaze that’s a bit self-defeating. This is a film about someone who, through aviation, strived to demolish caste and class distinctions. The act of flying itself is the biggest metaphor. But the treatment upholds those very distinctions: Poor citizens look and behave like stereotypes of poor citizens, while powerful bosses look and behave like stereotypes of rich people. The sentimentality of the climax is blunted by the sight of customers who look like they’re being paraded for a fancy commercial (Fashion collection: Spring Exotic). This is not always a drawback, given the necessary manipulations of mainstream cinema. But in the context of this film, it is jarring. It’s hard to enjoy a story that’s so conscious of its themes. It’s hard to admire a hero when his heroism rests on the portrayal of others. Put it this way: Sarfira looks at economy passengers from a business class seat. It empathises with poignant ground realities, but from the sky. As a result, it’s hard to tell a soaring take-off from a choppy landing.