Hrithik Roshan’s teeth look remarkably clean for a man who is supposed to be starving in a Patna alleyway, and that’s about as good a place to start as any. We have been conditioned to accept movie stars playing impoverished geniuses with a layer of bronzer and some dirt smudged onto their cheekbones like grease from a bicycle chain. It doesn't ruin the movie, exactly, but it sits there at the back of your brain, a constant little reminder that you are watching a vanity project wrapped in the flag of social uplift. If I'm honest, the brownish-grey filter applied to half the outdoor scenes in Super 30 feels less like an artistic choice and more like someone in the grading suite forgot to turn off the default setting for gritty biopics. Vikas Bahl directs with the subtlety of a brass band playing inside a telephone booth, hammering every emotional beat until it loses its shape.

The script, credited to Sanjeev Dutta, treats nuance like a contagious disease. Anand Kumar, the real-life mathematician who started a free coaching program for underprivileged kids, is rendered here as a cinematic saint who never has a complicated thought that doesn't immediately serve the narrative arc. There's a stretch in the middle where he refuses corporate money, loses his house, lives on raw onions, and gives inspirational speeches to pigeons, and the whole thing starts to feel like an instructional video on how to look noble while suffering. Yet the machinery of it grinds forward with terrifying efficiency. You get swept up in the arithmetic anyway, because even when a hindi film is yelling its themes at you through a megaphone, the basic human desire to see an arrogant bureaucrat get outsmarted by a kid from a dirt-floor hut remains undefeated. Roshan tries hard to strip away his movie-star gloss by hunching his shoulders and dropping his voice into a gravelly register, though his jawline keeps fighting the makeup department every step of the way.

As for the students who make up the titular thirty, they carry the picture across several rough patches where the dialogue sounds like it was translated from a self-help pamphlet written in 1994. They have that rough-around-the-edges naturalism that directors usually fail to capture when working with non-professionals, though a couple of them clearly had their dubbing done by the same studio engineer who voices every secondary villain in modern hindi movies. Nandish Singh, playing Anand’s loyal brother, has this one recurring reaction shot where he widens his eyes and nods slowly to indicate profound emotional support that got old by the fourth time it happened. Mrunal Thakur gets stranded in the thankless girlfriend role, a part written entirely out of old clichés where she mostly stands by the window looking worried while the men talk about equations. You keep waiting for her character to get an inner life, but the screenplay is too busy cutting back to the villains who are plotting the downfall of public education from inside wood-paneled offices that look like they were rented by the hour.

The cinematography by Anay Goswamy swings wildly between gritty handheld realism during the street fights and glossy, slow-motion hero shots that belong in a shampoo commercial rather than a drama about the JEE entrance exam. There's a specific tracking shot when Anand walks into a coaching institute for the first time that tries so hard to mimic the energy of Danny Boyle's work in Slumdog Millionaire that you can practically hear the director shouting at the camera operator to move faster. Ajay-Atul's soundtrack arrives with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the drywall. Every time someone solves a difficult problem on a blackboard, the orchestra swells to such a deafening pitch that you'd think they just discovered a cure for mortality rather than a shortcut for calculating logarithmic functions. It’s loud, it’s brassy, and it relies on traditional folk motifs mashed up with synthesized beats that wear out their welcome long before the interval hits.

What keeps the whole enterprise afloat is the sheer, unstoppable momentum of the underdog narrative, a formula that bollywood has been refining since before most of the actors in this cast were born. You can spot every plot turn coming from thirty minutes away, from the tragic accident that robs the hero of his Oxford scholarship to the corrupt minister who tries to bribe the math wizard with a suitcase full of unmarked cash. It shares a lot of DNA with 3 Idiots, minus the campus high jinks and the inventive gadgetry, trading the engineering humor for a heavier dose of economic fatalism. The class warfare angle is painted in broad, primary colors where the rich kids are all snobs who drive European sedans and the poor kids are virtuous prodigies who memorize calculus formulas while skinning potatoes. There is no middle ground, no complicated grey area where people compromise their morals just to pay the rent.

When the third act rolls around, the movie transforms into an action film where the weapons are algebra problems and the battlefield is an air-conditioned testing hall. Bahl stages the exam-taking sequences with the same frantic editing style usually reserved for car chases, cutting frantically between a ticking clock, a student's sweaty forehead, and a teacher biting his fingernails outside the gates. It shouldn't work, yet there's a perverse thrill in watching thirty scruffy teenagers out-maneuver a rigged system designed to keep them in the dirt. It makes you forgive a lot of the heavy-handed moralizing and the occasionally distracting CGI pigeons. By the time the credits begin to crawl over a montage of the real-life students whose lives inspired the project, the residual annoyance over the overly polished teeth and the repetitive musical cues has mostly dissipated, replaced by the mild, predictable glow of a crowd-pleaser that knew exactly which buttons to push and didn't care who heard it clicking.