FUKREY:WHAT THE F!!!!

 Why would the makers of “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara”—Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar back a film that has F for failure, written all over it starting from the title. Probably because it looks great on paper but fails miserably on execution.

Fukrey pronounced as  fookrey is nothing but phook-rey. Apparenty it means losers who are winners at street smart ideas. As the title suggests, it is the story of four failures.

Zafar, (Ali Fazal,Joy Lobo from 3 Idiots) strums a guitar with lifeless fingers, dreams of making it big and chooses his dream over his girlfriend. But whenever he gets a chance to perform, he says,”nikal nahin raha hai.”Instead he hangs around at a college, looks longingly at his ex ( Vishakha Singh), a teacher and sings. So that’s the first F… F for failure.

Miss Ex gives private tuitions in Accounts to a Sardar student, Lali (Manjot Singh of Oye Lucky Lucky fame), son of a restaurant owner. He stares hopelessly at her while she teaches and then mugs up, ’debit what goes in, credit what goes out.” This is repeated a few times in the movie like a punch line supposed to make the audience laugh. Funny? That’s F for  (not)funny.

Here’s the good part. Hunny ( Pulkit Samrat ) has a  buddy,Choo Cha (Varun Sharma )who sleeps and sleeps. Then he dreams. He wakes up, tells his dreams to Hunny.Hunny interprets the dream, adds up two and two, literally and comes up with a ‘lucky’ number. That’s their big ticket to lottery dreams. The dumb buddy admits to a cop, ”hum log padhai mein zaroor fail hote hain,lottery main nahin.” The two have been failing their 12^th boards and are now looking to buy leaked exam papers. The problem is that the more the script tries to inject humour in the dream narrations, the more irritating and boring it gets.

The four losers desperately need money. All roads via the college watchman (Pankaj Tripathi) lead to Sindrella’ tatooed, foul mouthed (F for foul) “Bholi Punjaban” (Richa Chadda, as fiery as she was in Gangs of Wasseypur) whose vocabulary is littered with “pichwara”. Despite that, the four of them forget to watch their backside which gets kicked around in more bizarre situations than their dream buddy, can think of.

Each of these characters makes for an interesting and quirky premise. However, director, Mrigdeep Singh Lamba, fails to take the film beyond the concept. The jokes fall flat. The lines (Vipul Vig) are forced. The actors except for Richa Chadda and Pulkit Samrat  are incredibly slow in their sense of timing. The music by Ram Sampath lacks the upbeat feel it had in Delhi Belly. The pace drags and drags.

Fukrey’s end credits abruptly roll in and you are left wondering what the F was that??