Farzi Review | A Smart and Entertaining Addition to Raj & DK’s Spy Universe

Raj and DK’s new Amazon Prime original series Farzi is a great example of developing a movie theme into an exhilarating thriller series. Set in the universe of The Family Man series, the director duo uses the humor-driven treatment to narrate a thriller that has the advantage of having a premise that is less explored. With the episodic structure allowing it to analyze characters in depth, Farzi is one of the few series I watched in one stretch after a long time.

Sunny, aka Sandeep, is our central character. He is an artist who knows how to create impeccable copies of great paintings. When his grandfather’s printing press faced the threat of shutting down due to enormous debt, those circumstances forced Sunny to try his luck in counterfeit currency making. How success in fake currency manufacturing changes everything for Sunny and his friend Firoz is what you see in Farzi.

There is a very peculiar style in which Raj and DK extract humor from a scene. It is actually the minimal nuances of the design of a sequence that makes them impressive. The conversations are a lot more practical, and they make an effort to make it less convenient for the characters. Unlike other thrillers where makers give the hero some advantage through someone else’s mistake or coincidence, here, the coincidences were primarily planted against Sunny. And the wild and huge-scale imaginations we see in the series are never done to make it look grand.

Since the topic is a reality in the real world, creating a fictional narrative has limitations. A Pathaan-like masala movie logic can’t be applied here. The Family Man-like treatment actually helps the series here as we see the operations of both the system and the rebels in a more realistic way. Michael Vedanayagam and his team have relatable issues, such as finding an apartment or dealing with divorce. Even Sunny and Firoz have the same amusement we feel in cracking one spotless counterfeit. Even though it is primarily a thriller, the series gives us a perspective on the scale of the impact of counterfeit currency on the economy and how the nexus works.

Character development is one of the major pluses in Raj and DK’s creations. And here also, one can see how they managed to make each character memorable by giving enough background information to the audience without deviating from the main plot. The only issue I felt was with Michael’s personal life thread. It felt more like a setup for season 2, and it rarely impacted the primary track of the series. They have kept the visual language in the same space, similar to The Family Man, and you get largely brightly lit frames even when there is tension on screen. It somewhere helps the series to stay in that black comedy space. The montages of currency making, the whole ship episode, the climax chase sequence, etc., were executed flawlessly.

I wouldn’t say Shahid Kapoor has got a character that is extremely different from what he has done in movies. Sunny is a character that fits the on-screen image of Shahid, and he performs the part perfectly. Even though his fashion sensibility makes Sunny this chilled-out cool dude, the writing offers the actor moments to perform subtly. The limitations and flaws assigned to the character of Michael Varadanayagam make him a very smart character. And when it comes to portraying swagger with cheekiness, Vijay Sethupathi is very much an easy choice. The effortlessness with which he performed the role was great fun to watch. I hope season 2 will also have the hilarious blackmailing banter between him and Zakir Hussain.

Raashii Khanna made the over-enthusiasm of Megha look believable on multiple occasions. Kay Kay Menon’s way of infusing humor into a menacing character was fun to watch. Bhuvan Arora as Firoz was pretty convincing as the impulsive best friend of Sunny. Amol Palekkar, Regina Cassandra, Chittaranjan Giri, and Kubra Sait are the other major names in the cast.

The milieu of Farzi is the same one we saw in The Family Man. Hence, the reactions of most of the characters feel relatable due to that middle-class setting. With facts getting the edge over fiction and the overall presentation focusing more on being entertaining, Farzi is a well-packaged series that is hilarious, gripping, and to an extent, emotional too.