Amrish Puri’s bald, scarred dome is reflected in a curved teaspoon while he explains to a room of terrified lackeys that he intends to blow up the Parliament building using a fleet of red-striped toy airplanes. If I'm honest, that single image tells you everything you need to know about why 1987 genre cinema in Mumbai worked when it had no earthly business working. Shekhar Kapur did not direct a superhero movie so much as he orchestrated a chaotic variety show where someone happened to have dropped a radioactive golden bracelet. There are moments in this three-hour Hindi film where the tone shifts so violently between domestic slapstick and apocalyptic fascism that you can practically hear the editing suite groaning under the weight of the spliced film stock, yet the thing holds together by sheer force of gravity and bad taste. Arun Verma is a man so perpetually broke he has to rent out half his damp Mumbai bungalow to a dozen orphans and a mouthy journalist before he even discovers the dead scientist father's invisible device, which is frankly a terrible pitch for a comic-book hero.

Anil Kapoor plays Arun with a breathless, lisping sincerity that makes you forget the character’s primary profession seems to be getting yelled at by children who need new shoes. He spends the first half-hour dodging rent collectors and pretending he isn't entirely useless around a kitchen, and when he finally slips the device onto his wrist and disappears into thin air, Kapoor doesn't suddenly transform into a brooding avenger. He just stays Arun, except now he can steal food off Amrish Puri’s opulent buffet tables without getting his collar grabbed. It’s an unglamorous, sweaty sort of performance that relies on rubbery physical comedy and wide-eyed confusion rather than chiseled stoicism. He is entirely believable as a guy who would use a high-tech invisibility watch mostly to scare a local vegetable vendor into giving him a discount on tomatoes. Kapoor lacks the marble-chiseled intimidation factor of Amitabh Bachchan in a movie like *Don*, but that's precisely why the invisibility trick works as a metaphor for his total powerlessness in a corrupt system.

Sridevi arrives about twenty minutes in as Seema, a high-strung reporter who moves into the chaotic boarding house and immediately starts treating Arun like a particularly slow-witted household appliance. Her introductory sequence involves a Charlie Chaplin impersonation that goes on for roughly five minutes longer than any audience’s patience should allow, complete with exaggerated pratfalls and enough slapstick business to fill an entire silent short. It’s a bold, exhausting choice that would sink almost any other leading lady working in Hindi movies at the time. Sridevi bulldozes through the sequence with such absolute, fearless commitment to the physical bit that you just surrender to it, even as you're wondering when the actual plot is going to kick in. Later, when she performs the Hawa Hawai number in a glittering peacock-feather costume while dangling from invisible wires, she transitions from annoying neighbor into an absolute force of nature who swallows the frame whole. There is a strange, breathless geometry to her comedic timing where she can look like a fragile porcelain doll one second and a cartoon cat with sharpened claws the next.

Then there is Mogambo, who occupies a volcanic subterranean lair complete with caged tigers, acid pools, and a throne room that looks like an acid trip inside a Brutalist municipal parking garage. Amrish Puri barks every line through a mouth full of fake teeth and gravel, chewing the scenery until the actual wood of the set seems to splinter around him. He wears military uniforms dripping in gold fringe that would make a South American dictator blush, and he has this habit of shouting his own name like a boastful gladiator every time one of his schemes temporarily avoids total catastrophe. It’s a performance of pure, unadulterated camp that never winks at the camera for a second, which is the only reason it actually works. When he tells his terrified scientists that Mogambo is extremely happy, you believe he is capable of vaporizing a subordinate with a green laser beam just to test if the batteries are still good.

The screenwriting credit belongs to Salim-Javed alumni Javed Akhtar, though you can feel the narrative constantly being pulled in three different directions by the commercial demands of the era. The orphans are not just background set dressing; they take up an agonizing amount of runtime with sing-alongs and tear-jerking speeches about national unity that feel dropped in from a completely different, much worse social drama. There's a little blind girl who gets hit by a car, a sequence that arrives with the narrative subtlety of a falling piano and lingers for days on moist reaction shots of Sridevi weeping into a dusty pillow. It’s a small thing, but that particular editing choice—holding on a tear rolling down a child's cheek for two beats too long—breaks the frantic momentum the first hour worked so hard to establish. The comedy routines featuring a pair of bumbling police officers appointed to investigate the invisible man are stolen straight from every bad British farce ever imported during the colonial era, complete with double takes and trousers falling down at inopportune moments.

Baba Lahiri’s score is a synthesizer-heavy assault of electronic drums and catchy hooks that somehow manages to fit both romantic moonlit ballads and industrial-strength villain anthems without melting down. The sound effects department deserves a special mention for the wet, squelching noise the invisibility watch makes every time someone presses the toggle button, a tiny mechanical detail that grounds the supernatural premise in something tactile and slightly gross. The visual effects, executed by Peter Pereira, rely heavily on double exposures, split screens, and wires that are occasionally so visible against the dark studio backdrops you can count the strands from the third row. When Arun picks up a teacup while invisible, you can see the fishing line trembling against the porcelain with the obviousness of a high school stage play. None of that technical clumsiness matters because the emotional geography of the scenes is so aggressively committed that your brain just fills in the missing pixels.

What keeps the film from dissolving into pure nonsense is its stubborn insistence on tying national sovereignty to the price of vegetables and the safety of a dozen foster kids. The political corruption isn't just an abstract backdrop for the hero's journey; it manifests as landlords hoarding sugar, gangsters shaking down orphanages, and bureaucrats stealing relief funds meant for the destitute. When Arun finally stands up to Mogambo’s syndicate, he isn't saving the world from alien invasion or cosmic doom. He is literally just trying to get the neighborhood kids back into their home after the landlord tries to bulldoze it to build a luxury hotel. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with state authority, often torn between reverence for the law and utter contempt for the people who enforce it, and this picture sits right in the messy middle of that contradiction. The villain doesn't want to conquer the globe out of some grand philosophical disagreement with democracy; he just wants to corner the market on gold and explosives so he can charge people for the privilege of breathing his air.

There is an infectious, desperate energy to the whole enterprise that you simply don't get from modern digital blockbusters where every punch is digitally polished and every joke is run through six rounds of focus groups. It was made during an era when a filmmaker could throw a musical number about electricity into a thriller about a nuclear-tipped terrorist and somehow make the transition feel like the most natural thing in the world. The narrative rhythm is lopsided, the supporting actors are frequently dubbed by people who sound like they recorded their lines inside a metal wardrobe, and the plot logic vanishes the second you stop to ask how an invisibility watch can be repaired with a standard soldering iron. Yet the picture works because every single person on screen is running at maximum velocity toward an imaginary cliff, screaming at the top of their lungs, entirely unconcerned with whether the landing pad is going to be there when they jump.