Richa Chadda wears a leopard-print jacket in half her scenes that looks like it cost three hundred rupees at a Sarojini Nagar stall, and somehow she makes you believe she could have you buried in a ditch behind a godown off Mathura Road by tea time. That's the first thing that actually worked for me when I sat down in a half-empty press screening years ago, waiting for another standard-issue Delhi-boys-getting-into-trouble comedy that usually smells like cheap Axe body spray and desperation. Hindi films set in the capital often fall into this terrible trap of trying to be too loud about their locations, plastering every frame with momos and Metro stations as if the audience has never seen a city before, but director Mrighdeep Singh Lamba managed to dodge most of that clutter by just letting his idiots be properly, stupidly broke.

The plot hangs together by dental floss and blind hope, tracking four good-for-nothing dreamers who need fifty thousand rupees to bribe a college official so they can pass their exams without opening a single textbook. Pulkit Samrat plays Honey with that particular brand of smirking confidence you only find in guys who sell second-hand Hyundai Santros and smoke behind paan shops, while Ali Fazal plays Zafar, the moody guitar player whose tragic backstory mostly consists of staring out rain-streaked windows while wearing a beanie indoors. Then you have Manjot Singh as Lali, who spends ninety percent of the runtime looking like he is about to throw up because his parents think he is studying accounts while he actually just runs errands for a local caterer. They stumble upon Chocha, played by Varun Sharma with an unhinged energy that makes you wonder what he had for breakfast, and Chocha has prophetic dreams about lottery numbers that actually come true if you translate them through the local street slang.

Lamba's direction is loose in that specific way that makes you think half the dialogue was figured out in a vanity van five minutes before the cameras rolled, which is honestly a compliment when it comes to comedies of error. He lets scenes breathe past the punchline instead of rushing to the next setup, lingering on reaction shots of bystanders who look thoroughly annoyed by these boys screaming in the middle of a crowded Daryaganj alley. The screenplay by Mrighdeep Singh Lamba and Vipul Vig weaves the absurd lottery-ticket mechanics with a surprisingly grounded look at middle-class desperation, treating the pursuit of quick cash not as a glamorous heist but as a sweaty, irritating chore involving too many auto-rickshaw rides and lukewarm cups of tea. It reminds me a bit of Dibakar Banerjee's Khosla Ka Ghosla, minus the middle-class heartbreak and plus a lot more guys running around in tight jeans with stolen lottery slips tucked into their waistbands.

The cinematography by Johny Lal captures Delhi without turning the place into a glossy tourism brochure or a muddy indie drama, keeping things bright and dusty and slightly overexposed, like an old photograph left in the sun on the dashboard of a Maruti 800. Ram Sampath's soundtrack hits the right notes without begging for your attention every time someone walks into a room, though I could have lived without hearing that one upbeat chase track recycled for every single time the boys have to run away from a bunch of angry wedding caterers or loan sharks. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time the electric guitars kicked in during the exact same mid-shot of Pulkit Samrat sprinting past a row of parked scooters.

The women in the cast get pushed around quite a bit by the narrative logistics, which is par for the course in these testosterone-heavy capers, but Vishakha Singh and Priya Anand do decent work with characters who exist mostly to look exasperated while the boys explain their latest hair-brained scheme involving a stolen peacock and a wedding planner. Richa Chadda, however, dominates every single frame she occupies as Bholi Punjaban, playing a local loan shark who runs her extortion ring with the casual menace of someone returning a borrowed Tupperware container. She doesn't scream or wave guns around to prove she is tough; she just leans against a pillar, chews on a toothpick, and lets her eyes go flat, and that tiny shift in posture tells you everything you need to know about why the boys are shaking in their cheap sneakers.

There's an underlying anxiety about money running through the entire movie that prevents it from turning into a mindless cartoon, because every single character in this universe is one missed EMI away from disaster. These boys aren't heroes of the working class or misunderstood geniuses; they are lazy, opportunistic, and remarkably selfish, yet the film never turns on them with moralistic judgment about the state of modern youth culture. Bollywood movies usually feel the need to tack on a five-minute speech about honesty and family values right before the credits roll, but Fukrey mostly lets its idiots stay idiots, which is a rare kind of mercy.

Manjot Singh steals about half his scenes simply by refusing to look comfortable in any given room, shuffling his feet and mumbling his lines as if he's perpetually afraid his mother is about to walk in and ask why he isn't doing his physics homework. The comedy relies heavily on this kind of low-stakes panic rather than elaborate sight gags, finding its rhythm in the way friends actually talk to each other when they are broke and stressed out, interrupting one another with bad ideas and half-baked insults. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, and the second half drags a bit when the plot requires everyone to converge on a farmhouse with too many side characters shouting at once, but the sheer likability of the central quartet carries it across the finish line.

When the credits start rolling, you realize you haven't learned a single profound thing about human nature, but you've spent two hours watching people who feel like actual human beings rather than mannequins hired to sell a lifestyle. It's a messy, uneven piece of work that gets distracted by its own subplots every now and then, but the laughs land where they are supposed to, and sometimes that's all you need from a Friday night trip to the cinema.