Twenty-eight years ago, there was “Mr India” – a film about an invisible man who helped bring down the bad guys. It is now 2015, and we have Vikram Bhatt‘s “Mr X“, which again is a film about an invisible man who fights crime. You would think, given how much Bollywood has progressed in the intervening years, that the 2015 film would beat the 1987 one at least on the technical aspects, if not the creative ones.
On the contrary, Bhatt’s film makes the special effects of the 1980′s look good with tacky 3D and amateurish special effects. The plot isn’t much better either. Emraan Hashmi plays Raghuram Rathod, a taciturn police officer forced to kill the chief minister of the state at the bidding of his corrupt police commissioner (Arunoday Singh).
Even though he is left for dead in an industrial fire, Rathod somehow emerges from this, and what’s more, is rendered invisible. His fiancée and colleague Sia (Amyra Dastur) doesn’t blink even once when she discovers that the person she thought was dead is not only alive, but also invisible.
Instead, she chases him down the streets to arrest him. Rathod too chooses to play along with this pointless game of hide-and-seek, choosing not to tell Sia who is responsible for his condition. Logic, apparently is the other thing that is impossible to spot in this film.
Bhatt manoeuvres the plot in such a way as to include one item number, two romantic songs and at least four kisses between Hashmi and Dastur, thus ticking all the boxes in a Bhatt-Hashmi collaboration. The rest is peripheral.
Like his character, Hashmi’s charm is beginning to flicker and disappear, and playing the same character over and over again is only making it worse. Dastur walks away with more lines and more screen space than the leading man, but doesn’t make much use of it, giving an insipid performance that is in keeping with the film’s tone.
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