After escaping a particularly frenetic shootout, the narrator of Chaar Yaar says, “This was like a movie... not the KJo kind but the RGV kind.”
The long shadow of Ram Gopal Varma, the chief purveyor of the gangster genre, looms over Chaar Yaar, directed by Vinay Waikul. One of the creators of the Prime Video show is underworld expert S Hussain Zaidi, the others being Waikul, Sambit Mishra and Saurabh Sawant. There are several allusions to Varma’s Satya, which was released a few years before the 2001 setting of the series.
The four friends are a disparate lot. The brain is Jay (Prayrak Mehta), also the narrator, whose flip tone makes light of the upheavals upending their middle class existence. Tony (Saqib Ayub) is a mechanic; Saahil (Purav Jha) and Sameer (Naman Jain) are squabbling idlers, with a family history of animosity.
The series begins at the interval point, with a chopped finger flying through the air and a decapitated head in a fish bowl. The finger-chopping happens because the quartet is entangled with a bunch of gangsters and have an earnest cop in pursuit.
The friends have borrowed money from the hoodlum Imtiaz (Sikander Kher). Imtiaz forces them to steal cars for him. The easy money leads to the buddies becoming professional...