It feels like Bhavesh Joshi Superhero has been around forever, but it was actually just released in 2018. This is probably because of the pandemic; our sense of time has been recalibrated, after all. But the fact that the film has continued to fuel lively online chatter is perhaps also down to the cult that has organically grown around it in these last five years. It comes up all the time; whenever director Vikramaditya Motwane has a major new release — which he often does — or when people are discussing the biggest box office flops of the last decade, or even when they’re tut-tutting about films that deserved better.
Of course, conversations like this have only increased in the post-pandemic era, when audiences are more likely to wait for movies to hit streaming. And this leads to an uncomfortable situation where some people try to convince you that films like An Action Hero and Bhediya technically belong to the same category as Bhavesh Joshi — big-budget genre movies that were overlooked in cinemas, but warrant a reappraisal when they hit the internet. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, because both those films are terrible. Although it’s likely that the same audience behaviour resulted in its box office failure — like most others, I watched it on Netflix the first time — it’s also true that Bhavesh Joshi always had the makings of a cult hit.
Unlike the Krrish movies, it didn’t offer star-driven masala entertainment. Bhavesh Joshi was a relatively grounded affair, inspired more by the DC films than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is something that Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor’s Siku even references at one point. The movie also tips its hat to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Tim Burton’s Batman, and even Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. But thematically, it has more in common with Salim-Javed’s streak of socio-political hits than anything else.
It tells the story of Siku, a man trapped in the millennial malaise, looking for meaning as he stumbles ahead in life. After spending his youth playing get-up with his stoner buddies and busting local miscreants, Siku does the ‘responsible’ adult thing and gets a job, while his friend — the titular Bhavesh — continues his idealistic crusade against corruption. Siku’s evolution is communicated in a wonderful time-lapse montage of sorts, with the Mumbai skyline evolving rapidly in the background, establishing both Siku and the city as the film’s two protagonists. But when Bhavesh is doxxed, lynched, and eventually murdered for his vigilante activities, Siku is struck by a crisis of conscience. He takes over the mantle of ‘Bhavesh Joshi’, and vows to bring the corrupt cops responsible for his friend’s death to justice.
I remember that the movie was released just a couple of months prior to another vigilante film, the utterly unwatchable John Abraham-starrer Satyameva Jayate — a movie that pretends it’s some kind of anti-hero thriller, but is actually just about a serial killer who burns corrupt cops to death. The release of these two movies within the span of two months perfectly captured the dichotomy of Bollywood, and kind of predicted where the industry was headed. In a matter of years, there would be room for only one kind of movie in cinemas. And Bhavesh Joshi’s failure proved that the writing was on the wall.
The film opens in 2011, and rather unironically suggests that Anna Hazare cultivated an ‘ummeed ka mahaul’ in the country with his large-scale protests against corruption. Of course, we know now that this movement probably opened the door for the rise of the BJP. But it’s unclear if Bhavesh Joshi is willing to examine this. The movie doesn’t even begin to tackle national issues; in fact, the scale is refreshingly hyper-local, and that’s a big part of its charm. The primary villain is a mid-level ‘mantri’ played by the late Nishikant Kamat, who is revealed to be in cahoots with a gangster named Patil. Together, they’re involved in a water-related scam that Bhavesh had exposed before his murder.
Kapoor’s Siku wears his decency like a burden. Perhaps the film’s most effective stretch is when he tries to get a passport through legal channels, and is repeatedly made to visit his local police station for verification checks. After Siku’s second or third trip to the station, you begin to understand why his documents aren’t being processed before he does. Siku has refused to pay the cops the compulsory bribe, purely out of respect for his late friend’s memory. But left with no other option, that’s exactly what he is forced to do. It’s a deft piece of writing that offers relatable drama — everybody has been through this — but it also transforms Siku from a reluctant hero into somebody that we, as an audience, can see ourselves rooting for. He’s one of us, after all.
On paper, what Siku is trying to do is nothing short of lunacy — he trains in martial arts, crafts his own costume, and even builds a motorbike. But films like this hinge almost exclusively on the characters more than their quests. Which is why the centrepiece action scene in Bhavesh Joshi works on more than one level. It’s thrillingly staged — a part of me is convinced Matt Reeves might have checked it out for The Batman — but it also functions just as well as a character-driven piece of drama. Scenes like this perfectly encapsulate the unique charms of this film, which remains, even five years down the road, just as relevant as it was when it first came out. It is indisputable proof that blockbuster openings and huge promotional campaigns are worthless if the ‘product’ that they’re servicing will be forgotten before you can say ‘Bhavesh Joshi Superhero’.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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