A western movie can be adapted for Indian audiences in several different ways. Sometimes you get a relatively faithful remake, though the shift in cultural perspective always changes things. Sometimes Indian filmmakers will take parts of one or more movies and remix them in different ways. And sometimes you get a movie like Superman (1980), where the filmmakers start with a very obvious point of inspiration and then run screaming in a completely different direction.
Superman has had plenty of cinematic origin stories over the years, but this movie skips the usual doomed planet and desperate scientists, and instead rips off Batman. Young Raja watches helplessly as his parents are murdered by a trio of bandits in cowboy hats. The bandits murder the kindly temple priest on the way out, so Raja goes to live with the priest's widow and daughter, but he is determined to have justice, and after proving his devotion Hanuman appears and grants him superpowers.
Years pass. Raja (now played by NTR) is not a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, he's a part owner of a mica mine. He's devoted to his adopted mother (Pamndari Bai) and sister Lakshmi (Geeta), and divides his time between mine stuff, spending time with his family, wooing Jaya (Jaya Prada), the daughter of his business partner (Allu Ramalingaiah), and performing the occasional daring rescue; he is secretly Superman, after all.
Meanwhile, the three bandits who murdered Raja's parents have become successful crimelords. When gold is discovered at the mica mine, they hatch a cunning plan to seize control, a plan which involves ordering their goons to dress up like ghosts and kill random villagers because that will help in some way? Though to be fair they are also kidnapping people and forcing them to mine gold, which at least means that the bad guys get some gold.
Still, Superman is on the case, and he quickly realizes that he's dealing with his parents' killers. he quickly eliminates Jai Singh (Tyagaraju) and his herd of brainwashed murder-elephants. Sardar (Srilanka Manohar) and his death ray don't fare any better. But the third bandit remains elusive, and Raja soon has other things to worry about.
Laxmi has been secretly canoodling with Mohan (Chakarapani), a boy from her college, and she has become pregnant. Raja goes to meet the boy, and Mohan promises to speak to his millionaire father Dharma Rao (Kaikala Satyanarayana). Rao agrees to the match, if Raja will give him his share of the mine as a dowry, and since it's a matter of his sister's prestige, Raja agrees. However, when the papers are handed over minutes before the wedding ceremony, Rao takes his son and flees to Hong Kong, leaving Laxmi to face total social ruin. (CLASSIC SUPERMAN ACTION!)
Raja has no choice but to follow him to Hong Kong, which is also sometimes Singapore, at least if the subtitles can be trusted. What he doesn't know is that Rao is secretly Maharaj, the third bandit, and that Maharaj is plotting to kill him with he help of hotel manager Miss Lee (Jayamalini), who is also an evil witch. (She's not secretly an evil witch; she's pretty open about using her spooky powers, and she wanders around in broad daylight in an evil sorceress outfit, complete with golden bat headdress.) And what they don't realize is that Raja is secretly Superman; it's easy to forget because he hasn't done any Superman stuff for a while.
This isn't the Superman I'm used to; he's bulletproof, moderately strong, and able to fly at a reasonable pace, but he won't be juggling planets any time soon. And Raja is nothing like Clark Kent; they're both good guys, but Raja is a business owner and family man and anything but mild mannered, and his concerns are the concerns of a Tollywood hero from 1980. He is, in other words, an appropriate Superman for his place and time. The movie's ambitions have outstripped its effects budget, its rather baroque plot has outstripped the rather scanty concept, and the end result is a little silly, but Superman should be a little silly.
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