Adventure follows wherever he goes and once dragged in, Banesh a.k.a. Faster Fene (FF), is not someone who will choose to keep quiet and let others handle the matter. Nearing the end of his teen years and appearing for his medical entrance exam, Banesh unintentionally — as always — gets dragged into probing the suicide of a stranger. Is it just a suicide or is there more than meets the eye?
Almost two generations of Marathi kids have grown up reading the adventures of this fictional character. In Director Aditya Sarpotdar’s film the boy from Fursungi , Banesh Fene (Amey Wagh), is no longer the kid detective of the late B.R. Bhagwat’s wonderful series. He still wears his favourite checked shirts but has switched to full pants from the shorts.
He continues to use his favourite cycle, but also falls back on the Internet for his investigations. He still has inquisitive eyes and a lock of hair dancing on his forehead but now faces more sinister things — the risk of getting killed.
In his sleuthing he receives help from Aboli (Parna Pethe), his childhood friend and now a journalist, Bhubhu (Shubham More), a former juvenile criminal and his gang, Ambadas (Siddharth Jadhav), an auto-driver with unusual record of driving in reverse gear and, not to miss, B.R. Bhagwat (Dilip Prabhawalkar) himself.
To find out the truth, these unarmed men and the woman will have to take on Appa (Girish Kulkarni), who runs an education mafia with unparalleled resources and is sitting on a pile of secrets.
Sarpotdar knows that though the FF books were for kids, the film is meant for all. So it has racy chase scenes, fights, catchy music (which sometimes reminds one of Dibakar Banerjee's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy ) and a dominant performance from Kulkarni.
Thankfully, the movie never deviates from the original story to songs, melodrama. Producers Riteish and Genelia Deshmukh have also ensured that the movie does not suffer on technical grounds.
But the pace does slow down. A film with a social issue at its core need not ‘preach’ to the audience; this one does, many a times. The almost two hour long movie could have been tighter, crisper and faster. The length takes away a bit of joy from watching this well-made, entertaining film that has fantastic production values and some never-before-seen drone footage of Pune’s iconic locales.
Comparisons are inevitable when an iconic character from a book finds a makeover in a movie. Wagh’s FF successfully brings out the kind-hearted but determined young aspiring detective on screen. But he gets overshadowed by Kulkarni’s heartless, greedy and violent Appa.
Pethe, better known for her performance in a play on Mahatma Phule does her job well here. For a veteran like Prabhawalkar, the role doesn't demand much and he plays it with ease.
Like tourists travelling to Baker Street in London to see Sherlock Holmes’ home, people have paid visits to Fursungi near Pune to see FF’s neighbourhood. Fursungi is now almost a part of Pune and its residents are unhappy for it being used as Pune’s “dumping ground”. In the movie though, FF has shifted his base to Baneshwar with his mother. Had he seen the piles of garbage in his hometown, he would have curved his tongue to make the trademark ‘Tock!’ sound to say, “Let’s clean this up.”
