The expected laughter you get out of the move, is way too low, for Kapil being present in it. You would get much more laughs from one episode of The Kapil Sharma Show. The story does take a fresh look at the pre-independence saga and shows us the story of one of the common men that could have probably joined the big names of Freedom fighters. However, it underutilizes the capacity of the story and somewhere in the middle, completely forgets about it. The cast does a great job, but, the loose story and the scarce laughs leave you with a feeling of discontent.

Firangi, Kapil Sharma's second big-screen venture, is unusual all right in terms of substance, but the concoction that the film rustles up is overlong and dreary. It's a case of ill-advised overreach. The makers (the lead actor is himself the producer) would have done themselves - and the audience - a massive favour had they set greater store by full-on farce than by shrill, scrappy drama. Firangi is directed by Rajiv Dhingra, who has a couple of Punjabi films behind him. This is his first foray into Hindi-language cinema. Of course, language is no barrier for him. The raw material is. And so is the treatment. He just doesn't seem to be able to decide if his film is an out-and-out comedy, a satirical take on the impact of the Raj on common Indians, or a romance that blooms across an intractable ideological divide. Firangi is a 160-minute film that also throws in, for good measure, the swadeshi agitation and a surprise appearance by Mahatma Gandhi amid BMKJ slogans. That is far too much weight for one film to carry. In the end - Firangi takes painfully long to get to that point, by which time the audience that has survived the rigmarole thus far is beyond caring - is a terribly tepid affair. Neither the comic potential at the core of the film nor the energy of Kapil Sharma's antics is enough to pull it out of the irremediable mess it degenerates into. Firangi might have been harmless fun if only it had stopped short of running so hopelessly amok.

This Kapil Sharma starrer is mildly engaging. The trouble with this mildly engaging film, with a solid supporting cast, is that it is far too long. Sharma is serviceable as a young Punjabi munda, making eyes at a blushing Sargi (Dutta). The setting, meant to be the 1920s, is all created on set, but you do initially manage to ignore the carefully crafted mud huts, because the language spoken is real, the gidda is homespun; as are the costumes. The greedy whitey (Sonnenblick) is not half bad, even if he sounds more American than Brit, and there’s some fun to be had with Mishra camping it up as the local ruler with a large harem, and a haughty daughter who claims she went to Oxford, no less. But it goes on and on. And on. Post interval, it slows down and begins to grate, even when the in-awe-of-the-‘firangi’-hero comes to his own proud ‘desi’ roots.

One thing's clear. With his second outing in the movies, Kapil Sharma wants to desperately drive home a point that he has no interest in milking his comic talent in the movies. While it's a ballsy move for a successful comedian to explore other genres, the question is, are his fans ready for it and can he do it convincingly? Not really, when he wears one expression (lack of interest) on his face, throughout the film. Watching Kapil act innocent and robotically romance a much younger looking Ishita Dutta (last seen in Drishyam), who channels her inner Amrita Rao for almost three hours is hard to sit through. Unfortunately, the film's massive runtime is not its only drawback. Even if you ignore the 'inspired content', a period film deserves to be made on a certain scale and with some authenticity. Firangi has neither. All villages look the same and you see the same 15 people roaming everywhere. The costumes and accents are inconsistent. The British sound American, a London returned Indian princess (Monica Gill) dresses and acts more British than the British. She speaks to her fellow Indians in English and with the British in Hindi. The evil Indian king (Kumud Mishra) is neither funny nor menacing. The only actors who look logical and put in some effort to their characters are Edward Sonnenblick and Anjan Srivastav (as Gandhi bhakt). They try to infuse some method to the unending madness. Firangi moves at a snail's pace leading us to a semi-fun climax. The family film isn't really tacky or repulsive, it's outright boring and that's probably worse because it's not even unintentionally entertaining.