‘Super 30’ Critics’ Review: Facile Look at Class Dynamics

Super 30 is directed by Vikas Bahl.

Directed by Vikas Bahl, Super 30 recounts the story of Anand Kumar, who founded a coaching institute to prepare underprivileged students for the IIT examinations. Hrithik Roshan plays Anand Kumar in the film, which hit the theatres today (12 July). Here’s what the critics have to say about Super 30.

Once Anand Kumar launches Super 30, the storytelling becomes as uneven as the film’s understanding of caste, getting downright lacklustre in large portions. The director seems to lose his grip on the narrative as it rolls along, and it does not help that Hrithik Roshan’s performance is patchy at best. This is not even counting the fact that at 45, the actor is playing a character who is in his teens at the start of this film and in his 20s through most of the rest of it. This is also not counting the fact that Anand in the late 1990s is styled to look like a character out of a K.L. Saigal movie. Super 30 comes across as a project that someone somewhere lost interest in at some point and then it all came apart. What else but casualness can explain the misspelling of the production house’s own name in the final credits?

Anna MM Vetticad, Firstpost

There is a lot that is really amusing about Super 30. Like the blue-blooded Hrithik Roshan, as Kumar, talking of bringing down the hegemony of the privileged. Harping on how king’s son won’t be the king; the one who truly deserves the crown will claim it. Rather than taking it with any modicum of seriousness I could almost hear Kangana Ranaut spouting Bollywood’s much reviled N word—i.e. nepotism--through Roshan/Kumar. That’s because the film itself remains a feel-good, facile, protracted and eminently boring look at class dynamics while barely touching upon the accompanying caste conundrums.

Namrata Joshi, The Hindu

Hrithik Roshan isn’t bad, though his problematic brown face-paint is inconsistent to the point of distraction. The actor plays guilelessness with charm in Super 30 as a Patna boy hungry for the most advanced mathematical equations he can lay his hands on, a boy who hides a smile about a girl shyly behind a gamchha. His eyes gleam only when discussing numbers and talking to students, but Super 30 pushes Roshan into awkward directions — like a nutty Paisa-Paisa song where he’s briefly corrupted by money and tight shirts — and hands him too much melodrama.

Raja Sen, Hindustan Times

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