With Parchi’s release, I believe it is high time we accept two things: first, that this subgenre of comedy/action/heist movies — let’s christen it ‘Losers and Capers’ — is the go-to choice for Pakistani action filmmakers; second, that our filmmakers are quite happy with producing mediocre movies.
There is a reason why I’ve come to this conclusion. Of all four ‘Losers and Capers’ movies — Jalaibee, Na Maloom Afraad, its sequel and Chupan Chupai — not one has risen to the standard of an excellent motion picture. Formula-wise, the stories are easy enough to lay out (though, not write) and you don’t need to cast major actors (not one film had A-list actors at the time of their making). Despite the allure of the genre, we fail to add two critical components to the mix: character depth and sensibly thought-out stories (as good as NMA was, its last hour was idiotic). The filmmakers substitute these components with oddball characters and comedy, and hope the audience will get hoodwinked.
Parchi has more or less the same creative pitfalls. The film opens hard and fast with Bash (Ali Rehman Khan) — your stereotypical angry young man — in hot water with a local trigger-happy mob boss called Zodiac (Shafqat Cheema). To get his life back, Bash has mere days to accumulate five million rupees any which way he can.
Enter the rest of the loser crew — Bash’s recently fired straight-laced brother Bilal (Usman Mukhtar), a simple-minded vet named Bhola (Shafqat Khan, also the screenwriter) and Saqlain (Ahmed Ali Akbar), a whimpering romantic whose biggest problem is that he can’t get a job paying above 50,000 rupees.
There is little to no actual plot in Parchi. It has a series of events forcibly tied to the five lead actors
In desperation the group reaches out to Eman (Hareem Farooq), a gorgeous local hoodlum who keeps her neighbourhood safe from extortion slips. Together they plot a caper so loopy and cinematically incoherent that I still have a problem connecting the dots.