The leaders of India have been assembled - politicians, police chiefs, and the like - to decide what should be done about this new threat to the security of their country. That threat is Mogambo (Amrish Puri), an international supervillain who is exploiting the divides in Indian society to tear it apart and he has fresh plans to take over for good and be proclaimed King of the entire subcontinent. Who can possibly stop him? There is one person, but he has no idea yet: Arun Verma (Anil Kapoor), the son of a scientist who had devised a formula for invisibility which Mogambo now wants. The scientist is now dead, but Arun can still inherit his power...
For Western audiences, Anil Kapoor would be best known for his role as the quiz show host in Slumdog Millionaire, a role he played so convincingly that many thought he was the real Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? presenter in India. He went on to a plum role in television's 24, but fans of Bollywood cinema would have been familiar with him ever since, well, ever since this film, often described as the original Indian superhero movie, not that it had much competition (there was the Indian Superman movie, also from this year, which used footage from the Hollywood version for a distinctly unauthorised take on the famed character).
But there is still a little dispute over whether Mr India was really a superhero movie or not, as Arun doesn't have any powers himself as he relies on a special watch from his father which lends him the talent for invisibilty. However, there are strong signs that the official Superman was what the makers of this had in mind, as Mr India becomes Arun's secret identity, he fights crime with his powers, Mogambo is a Lex Luthor figure (Puri is hugely entertaining here) and his girlfriend is a newspaper reporter in a Lois Lane style. She is Seema (Sridevi), but she doesn't fall for Arun, she falls for his alter ego even though she cannot see what he actually looks like. For reasons too complicated to go into, she moves in with him, or rather into the spare room in the orphanage he runs for a handful of needy causes.
The pressures of survival when you don't have as much money as you would like are to the fore, as Arun struggles to make ends meet for him and his charges, and it is situations like this that Mogambo is preying on, directly for Arun's case when the villain tries to oust him from his home so he can use it as a weapons depot. For the most part this emphasises the comedy while getting sentimental about the youngsters, and would appear to have been made with family audiences in mind, or at least it would but for two sequences: one where a little girl is blown up by Mogambo's terrorists, and another where a song and dance number with a rainsoaked Arun and Seema turns unexpectedly sensual.
Maybe they're made of sterner stuff in India, but you can't imagine family fun out of the West including material like that for an all ages target audience. Largely this is lighthearted stuff, patriotic about India needing to stand firm from the roots up, but nothing too heavy to affect the essential comic book nature of the movie. The special effects aren't much more advanced than what Claude Rains got up to in The Invisible Man back in 1933, although there's a neat trick when the unseen Arun drains a bottle of cola hanging in mid-air, and the production did look to have been comparitively lavish, piling on the dancing between the action sequences. Kapoor made for a solid hero, with his slightly bumbling civilian guise contrasting nicely with the authoritative voice he uses for Mr India, and he and Sridevi generated sparks to keep the energy levels up for what could have been a long three hours. If you didn't mind the lurches in tone in the last third, there was much to appreciate here. Music by Laxmikant and Pyarelal.
