The sound design on the punches in the first twenty minutes of Bhavesh Joshi Superhero has this weird, papery snap to it that kept pulling me out of the theater, or my living room, wherever you happen to be watching Vikramaditya Motwane’s 2018 vigilante misfire now. If I'm honest, it sounds less like bones breaking and more like someone aggressively folding heavy cardstock behind a curtain. That tiny acoustic mismatch set the tone for a picture that desperately wants to be the Dark Knight of the Western suburbs but frequently settles for the energy of a very expensive public service announcement about municipal water supply. Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to figure out how to do superheroes without a multi-million-dollar Marvel apparatus behind them, and Motwane’s approach was to strip away the capes entirely, replacing them with a red motorcyclist helmet and a homemade leather jacket that smells faintly of cheap spray paint. It is an interesting gamble that pays off about as often as it faceplants into the concrete.

Motwane directs with a heavy hand that alternates between agonizingly slow close-ups of Harshvardhan Kapoor looking intensely troubled and hyper-kinetic chase sequences shot through a greenish, smoggy filter that makes Mumbai look like a level from a video game nobody wanted to play. The screenplay, co-written with Anurag Kashyap and Abhay Koranne, starts as a Gen-Z buddy comedy about three idealistic engineering graduates who decide to put GoPro cameras on their helmets and record themselves fixing minor civic nuisances like illegal parking and bribe-hungry cops. When things escalate into real estate corruption and murder, the tone shatters into pieces that never quite fit back together. Kapoor plays Sikandar, the guy who stays behind while his friend Bhavesh actually builds a movement around ordinary people fighting back. Kapoor has this permanently glazed expression, like he is trying very hard to remember if he turned the gas off before leaving his trailer, and it drains the middle section of the picture of the urgency it needs to justify a runtime stretching well past two hours. Priyanshu Painyuli, playing the titular Bhavesh, does all the heavy lifting in the first hour with a nervous, twitchy charisma that reminds you what actual passion looks like on screen. He makes you believe that a guy who loves comic books and civic planning could actually start a grassroots uprising using nothing more than a projector and some leaflets. Once Painyuli leaves the narrative space, the movie has to rely entirely on Kapoor's brooding intensity, which is a bit like replacing a sports car engine with a lawnmower motor and hoping nobody notices on the highway.

The cinematography by Siddharth Diwan captures the dusty, unglamorous underbelly of the city with a lot of grit and very little romance, avoiding the glossy aesthetic that usually dominates multiplex fare. Then Amit Trivedi drops a soundtrack that hits you right in the chest during the montage sequences, particularly the track "Chavanprash," which almost makes you forget that the narrative logic surrounding the hero's training montage makes zero physical sense. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how Sikandar goes from a guy who gets easily winded jogging down an alley to doing parkour over shipping containers simply because he put on a leather jacket and watched a couple of YouTube videos. That sort of narrative laziness creeps into the second half where the villains are cartoonish real estate moguls who operate with impunity in broad daylight, surrounded by henchmen who clearly took their acting classes from the same correspondence course. You keep waiting for the narrative to subvert these clichés, the way Vasan Bala did with ridiculous precision in Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, but Motwane plays it completely straight, turning what should have been a clever subversion of vigilante tropes into a standard-issue revenge thriller with an indie coat of paint.

The themes of disillusionment among urban youth hit close to home, reflecting how quickly idealism curdles into cynicism when you realize the municipal corporation doesn't care about your potholes. Yet the film treats corruption like a specific bug in the system rather than the operating system itself, leading to a climax that feels strangely small despite all the fire and broken glass. Kapoor tries his best to sell the final confrontation in the docks, but his physical presence lacks the menace or the tragic weight required to carry a man who has lost everything for a mask. By the time the credits roll over a final tracking shot that attempts to pass the torch of vigilantism to the next generation of bored office workers, you are left wondering if the whole experiment was worth the bruised shins. It is neither the disaster its box office failure suggested nor the misunderstood masterpiece some late-night Twitter threads claim, sitting squarely in that uncomfortable middle ground where ambition outruns execution by a country mile.