Vikramaditya Motwane’s Bhavesh Joshi, a superhero film starring Harshvardhan Kapoor, spends a considerable amount of time pondering over and dismantling the meaning of a hero. It’s not that the movie’s two main characters – the two friends, Bhavesh (Priyanshu Painyuli) and Siku (Kapoor) – don’t consider themselves heroes; it’s just that the film is more level-headed.Inspired by an anti-corruption movement, not different from the one led by Anna Hazare, Bhavesh and Siku feel like revolutionaries. They participate in rallies. They look into the camera and say, “Corruption is shit, and shit stinks.” They volunteer to go to a jail.A revolution is as much outwards as it is inwards, reflecting truths both about the targets – the corrupt perpetrators – and the sources, the enraged, moral civilians. Bhavesh and Siku are of course annoyed by the corrupt Indian state, but their disappointment is also personal. They are boys in their 20s beset by an existential crisis. They can finally see through the lies they were fed throughout, the mediocrity of a life they’re invariably headed towards: a 9-to-5 coding job in a multinational – about to become a pixel in a sea of pixels, thriving in a crowd, pointless by itself.Nothing happens too quickly in this movie though. Bhavesh and Siku first experiment with the idea of dispensing quick justice. They launch a YouTube channel called ‘Insaaf TV’ where, wearing brown paper bags on their heads, they film and shame citizens for minor violations: peeing on roads, burning trash, driving in wrong lanes. The videos become viral, stoking their sense of purpose. “We’re basically like the Indian Justice League,” a proud Siku tells a girl in a bar. “You mean like Spider-Man?” She asks. “No, that is Marvel,” he says. “We’re DC, darker, cooler, edgier.”Bhavesh and Siku, naïve, bumbling and earnest, want to desperately hold onto something. The film recognises that haste and plays along, not hesitating to make fun of them. Here Motwane is as much critiquing the genre of superhero films as he is wondering how an Indian superhero would look like. Bhavesh is often called “Malad ka Insaaf-Man”, and that monikers seem instinctively funny, like someone showing up uninvited to a Halloween party wearing kurta-pyjama.But Motwane is also toying with the meaning of a (Bollywood) hero in a superhero film. For the film’s first hour, Siku isn’t the story’s centrepiece. A few years later, when reality has set in, he wants to leave India for the US, heading his company’s development team in Atlanta. He’s left Insaaf TV and advises Bhavesh to do the same. When Siku gets punched by Bhavesh after an ugly disagreement, he slyly films him on camera dissing the country and gets him thrashed by a mob that calls him, “anti-national”. Unlike Bhavesh, Siku bribes a police official, so that his passport gets approved. Besides, Siku doesn’t give the film its name, Bhavesh does. Siku, unlike other building-jumping, villain-thrashing figures, is a reluctant superhero, almost an afterthought. It’s fascinating, but not altogether surprising, that Bhavesh Joshi changes when Siku does.The story of every superhero film is not just the story of its hero, but, equally important, of its villain, of the world they both belong to, one that would be destroyed and saved. Here the setting is Mumbai, and the perpetrator is a local MLA, Rana (Nishikant Kamat), responsible for a manufactured water crisis in a Mumbai suburb. Rana’s henchmen steal water from the different localities and sell it at an inflated rate. Bhavesh is tipped off about the problem and he starts investigating the case, which incriminates, among others, some local police officers. When Bhavesh falls short, Siku takes over. Bhavesh Joshi is, after all, not just a name, but also a quest for justice, a feverish plan for restoring balance.When Siku, the new Bhavesh Joshi, takes centre stage, the film becomes considerably solemn, seeing this story not from the outside, as it was before, but from the inside, believing its various eccentricities, shedding its cynicism and sense of irony in favour of a more straightforward good-vanquishes-evil narrative. Motwane still manages to have fun with the premise and the genre – there’s a scene where Siku gets entangled in a mesh of electric wires while jumping from a building, resembling a pauper Spider-Man; another one has him kicking a cop sideways while riding his bike (powered by a nitro boost), as if playing a game of Road Rash – but the overall mood, after a point, is straight-arrow seriousness, rather than unpredictable whimsical.We’ve seen how a regular superhero movie plays out. The genre has been risking the danger of narrative fatigue for quite some time, and Motwane is bound in its confines. Bhavesh Joshi is ineffective when it is verbalising and moralising – the importance of conquering fear, the role of citizens in a democracy – the kind of stuff that is usually seen in less accomplished, less confident films. Even its most vital subplot, centred on a corrupt MLA depriving ordinary people of their rights, is devoid of complexity or nuance; it is too on-the-surface to stoke curiosity or create meanings. It is also too contained in itself to paint a broader canvas; it is mostly literal, hardly metaphorical. The film’s antagonist, Rana, is similarly an opaque evil character.You expect a film by Motwane, who is easily one of the best Hindi filmmakers at the moment, to take you by surprise, to unsettle you, to make you reassess – or solidify – your views. Motwane dangles a few interesting ideas, such as examining our desires for a hero-like figure; seeing the mundaneness of daily life as an ever-present, all-consuming threat; underscoring the ease of making the ordinary villainous, of turning a conscientious citizen into an “anti-national” or a “terrorist”. Then there are other little pleasures typical of a Motwane film. His use of space, for instance – in Bhavesh Joshi, ordinary places, such as Suki’s flat, Mumbai’s bars and roads and stations, come alive with terrific, life-like precision. Motwane also revels in the small flourishes that enliven an action drama like this – the mixed martial art fight sequences, often captured in top-down and wide-angle shots, are riveting, so are the elaborate chase sequences, with bikes gliding and swerving and crashing, a fest of adrenaline rush that immerses you in individual set action pieces.But these entertaining elements can’t compensate for the fact that Bhavesh Joshi lacks the bite that makes a movie memorable. It is a film that is trapped by the myopia of its genre, often struggling to break free.
