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MR. INDIA (1987)
Producer: Boney Kapoor Music: Laxmikant-Pyarelal Starring: Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Amrish Puri, Satish Kaushik, Ashok Kumar, Harish Patel, Venus Pujari, Tapan Shah
Running Time: 179 Minutes
CineRating: 5.5 out of 10
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"Mogambo...is happy."
-- Mogambo
When the producers of Elizabeth [1998] were making up their minds on whether or not to sign Shekhar Kapur as director for their lavish period epic, it seems that in all likelihood Kapur's Mr. India was not the film that clinched their decision. In fact, one is more inclined to believe that Kapur somehow managed to bury this disjointed film in the same closet that John Woo probably used to keep Run Tiger Run out of his portfolio whilst making his break to Hollywood. And just as the kiddie comedy Run Tiger Run seems incongruous to Woo's later, more mature and violent works such as A Better Tomorrow and The Killer, so too is it difficult to resolve the extreme differences between Mr. India and Kapur's subsequent Bandit Queen -- the gritty biopic of female outlaw Phoolan Devi.
This is not to infer that Mr. India is a bad film. In fact, once you get past the film's sluggish and insufferably cute first hour, the movie has more than a few aces up its sleeve. The most impressive is an extended episode of madcap silent-era slapstick in which the irresistible Sridevi disguises herself as Charlie Chaplin and proceeds to wreak havoc on a gambling joint. Even Tsui Hark might have had trouble coming up with a sequence as frenetically inventive as this one. While the movie has been deemed as Bollywood's take on The Invisible Man, it's actually more like a twisted version of one of those old family-friendly, vaguely sci-fi Disney movies that used to star Fred MacMurray or Kurt Russell. Here, Anil Kapoor toplines as a big-hearted violinist named Arun, who rents a huge house that he uses as a makeshift shelter for a group of orphans. Unfortunately for Arun, the evil, aspiring despot Mogambo (Amrish Puri, at his over-the-toppest) seeks to conquer India by spreading violent unrest, and wants to use Arun's dwelling place as a storehouse for his weapons cache. When his underhanded methods of coercion fail, Mogambo has his goons violently assault both Arun and his young charges and give them two days to vacate the premises. Luckily for Arun, his late father had been perfecting the formula for invisibility before his untimely death at the hands of Mogambo's goons. Unbeknownst to Mogambo, the father had passed on the fruits of his labor to his colleague, who now realizes that it's time to hand the father's invention to its rightful heir. Strapping on the oversized watch-like device to his wrist, Arun is able to make himself invisible with the flick of a switch (and, for some unknown reason, he also seems to get an infusion of superhuman strength). Fortunately, Arun is no hollow man, but a morally upright citizen who uses his newfound power to crack down on all the corruption and evil around him. Soon, he becomes known as the national hero "Mr. India."
One of Bollywood's most popular and beloved films, Mr. India is in the spirit of such American family fare as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Doctor Dolittle (the old version), but with a harsher edge, particularly in the film's last hour, which features the death of a character that you would never expect to see in a Hollywood film. On the other hand, the film's first sixty minutes are more suitable for the pre-teen set with Kapur wasting few opportunities to ladle on the sentimental slop as he lovingly lingers on the joyful relationship between the boyish Arun and the sweet little tykes in his care. (Satish Kaushik, who recently directed Anil Kapoor in the boxoffice flop Badhaai Ho Badhaai, shows up here playing "Calendar," the orphanage's cook.) The story livens up with the introduction of the child-hating journalist Seema, portrayed by the wide-eyed Sridevi, the top Bollywood actress of the eighties and early-nineties and, some might argue, of all time (she later married producer Boney Kapoor and went into semi-retirement). A silky smooth screen comedienne in the Myrna Loy/Carole Lombard mode, Srivdevi barrels through the famous song-and-dance romp "Hawa Hawaii" (incidentally, if you've ever wanted to see Indians in blackface, this is your chance) and later steams up the screen with her suggestive dancing-in-the-rain number "Kate Nahin Katte." In an amusing twist, Arun becomes both Clark Kent and Superman to Sridevi's Lois Lane as he buddies up to her in his role as her landlord and then rescues her from one misadventure after another in his invisible alter-ego.
Co-screenwriter Javed Akhtar mined similar territory years before with the offbeat James Bond take-off Shaan [1980], which featured a comparably demented villain (modeled on Blofeld) and his booby-trapped secret hideaway. However, in that film, Akhtar thankfully left out most of the kiddie characters and scripted a memorable finale in which Amitabh Bachchan wrestled a monstrous killer croc. There's nothing quite as inspired in Mr. India, although Anil Kapoor does make for an appealing hero and the movie does have its share of bizarre little in-jokes (one of Mogambo's henchman is a distinctly Oriental-looking Indian named "Dr. Fu Manchu"). On the other hand, the invisibility effects are strictly low-tech (no surprise there), and the invention's one major weakness -- that the invisibility is rendered ineffective when viewed through the color red -- is barely exploited in ways that could've added more tension to the scenario. Nevertheless, Mr. India is a must for Sridevi fans and a reasonably painless timewaster for everyone else who's got three hours to shuck and a tolerance for precocious, singing orphans.
The hard-to-find Desi DVD boasts subpar picture quality with washed-out, unstable colors and heavy print wear. The English subtitles occasionally take on the form of closed captioning with descriptive phrases such as "Mechanical whirring...bubbling" to convey the actual sounds of a scene. After years of delay, Eros finally released its own DVD version of Mr. India in 2003.
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DVD Specs:
Desi Filmz
All Regions
Removable English Subs (none for the songs)
No extras
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