Super 30 Film Review: Mission Impossible?

Super 30 does not shed light on the multitudinous problems that the children coming from impoverished families seeking a brighter future for themselves have to face. Instead, the movie pivots around Anand Kumar, a mathematician from Bihar who educates the underprivileged for free. While this is acceptable in a biography, in this case, it makes the narrative one-sided as we see in the Super 30 film review.

Hrithik Roshan, who plays Anand Kumar in the movie, does not share any physical likeness with the mathematician he is portraying. The makeup artist must have had to work hard to get Hrithik to look believable as a common man. The film uses to good effect its fair-skinned and charismatic crowd-puller hero. Super 30 panders to the most common denominator of superfluousness. Yes, a lot here makes little sense and is only there to exaggerate the story.

Although Anand gets admission into Cambridge University, he has to forgo it as he cannot afford the airfare to travel to London. Later, Anand is helped monetarily by a local businessman, Lallan Singh, played by Aditya Srivastava in return for teaching at his coaching class. That is until Anand has a bright idea to start a coaching class for the underprivileged children. As expected, this does not go down well with the businessman and the goon politician backing him.

Meanwhile, Anand, against all the odds, is preparing his batch of Super 30 for the entrance exam to the Indian Institute of Technology. If that seems like an arduous task, it is. But Anand is not one to give up on his dream.

While this real-life story had all the elements for a gripping and uplifting film, the director does nearly everything to ruin a good story. Melodrama takes precedence, and things go over the top more often than not. While a few scenes are outright absurd, others stretch far more than they should. It is nice to see a director use imagination, but in a realistic movie about the travails of a teacher striving to uplift penurious children by providing them an affordable education, such excesses prove to be the film’s undoing.

Super 30 lacks subtlety in dealing with the subject at hand. Barely any scene stays with you as you walk out of the theatre barring ones that show Anand with his father, a postman brilliantly portrayed by Virendra Saxena. Pankaj Tripathi as the conniving and selfish politician is great and lights up the screen with his presence. However, nothing that Hrithik Roshan or the rest of the cast does can resurrect the movie.

Playing to Hrithik fans, who see him on the silver screen after a hiatus of sorts, the director has infused nearly every frame in the movie with its protagonist. There is little scope for any nuance in the story to take prominence. Hrithik has done a commendable job given that he does not share any similarity with the person he is portraying. The actors playing the Super 30 students do reasonably well, too. Although everywhere you look, the film is about broad strokes with few details. In its execution, the movie squanders away much of the story’s potential and has to go down as a missed opportunity ultimately.

The irony is, although the movie spends much of its time on Anand Kumar, it provides little insight about the man. I do not recommend Super 30 to anyone apart from the diehard Hrithik Roshan fans. The latter will lap up the opportunity of watching their beloved actor on the big screen after a long time. For the rest, Super 30 is avoidable. If you want to see a richly textured and inspiring story, there are a plethora of better movies.

Super 30 film review rates Super 30 (2 / 5)

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