The description of every non-conformist action hero in a Bollywood film reads the same. It goes something like this: “Usey khatron se khelne ka shauk hain. Woh duniya se nahin, duniya usse darti hain. Zamaana usey kabhi paagal, toh kabhi sarfira kehta hain.” Et al, et al, et al. The quality of the vocabulary differs, depending on how much the film in question has paid its writer. In the case of Yudhra, one isn’t sure if a writer was even employed in the first place.
To begin with, logic isn’t Yudhra’s strong suit. We can let that pass (to some extent) given that the most watchable action films often sacrifice how, when and why at the altar of slap, whack and thwack. But the action in Yudhra is hardly novel. There is a lot of slo-mo, a great deal of slickness and scene after scene of people being butchered in ways that make you feel you are in a meat shop and not a movie theatre. The main villain being killed by lopping off his eye with a lollipop (yes, a lollipop) is perhaps a first. We were inches away from being subjected to having Kamariya lollypop lagelu playing in the background.
That apart, for those who enjoy gory action, Yudhra may have some pull, but we have seen much of what plays out here done much better before. Even those who aren’t familiar with the Oldboys of the world would have experienced it closer home in Kill, which is undoubtedly the best action film coming out of Bollywood in recent times.
The common link between Yudhra and Kill is Raghav Juyal. The dancer-turned-actor plays an unhinged villain in both films. In Yudhra, he just sports more expensive clothes. In fact, in this film, Raghav is made to strut around the sunny streets of Lisbon dressed in fur. Everyone around him is in summer attire. Yudhra (Siddhant Chaturvedi), hot on the heels of Raghav’s Shafiq in this particular scene, is on the other end of the sartorial spectrum — he wears emoji-printed electric blue boxers and a yellow bathrobe, alternately running, biking and Parkour-ing to reach his nemesis. Yudhra makes up for it by wearing a crisp white shirt (that gets bloodied before one can say ‘ketchup!’) and a blue suit in the climax.
The plot of Yudhra is as old as Dadasaheb Phalke himself. A typical revenge story with hardly any layers and a twist in the tail that anyone brought up on a steady diet of commercial Bollywood can smell a mile away, Yudhra has its eponymous hero saddled with anger issues since childhood. From pummelling classmates in school to doing dangerous street stunts as an adult, Yudhra’s obnoxiousness is endearingly described as one that befits a “risk taker” and ascribed to “genetic problems”. His dead father, a dreaded cop who took on the drug mafia in his day, was an angry young man too.
Hence, it is quite ridiculous that a civilian rookie with a seesaw temperament like Yudhra is sent on an undercover mission to bring down a globally flourishing drug smuggling empire. It is even more indigestible that the kingpin of the drug racket (played by Raj Arjun with predictable menace) trusts Yudhra to pull off what is the biggest drug deal ever. As we said, logic and Yudhra missed meeting each other by a mile.
So did any other comprehensible department of movie making. Yudhra jumps from one action set piece to another with very little in terms of story or emotion to bind them together. To be fair, some of the action is clap-worthy — an underwater gunfight sequence and a shootout on a ship in the darkness of the night are well executed, with a lot of credit also going to cinematographer Jay Oza, the man who brought Gully Boy to life. But these are too few and far between to justify sitting through Yudhra’s two-hour-plus running time.
Even the romance, meant to anchor the film, lacks both spark and sparkle. Malavika Mohanan makes her Bollywood debut as leading lady. Malavika, a fine actress otherwise and not averse to taking up challenging roles like the one she played in Majid Majidi’s Beyond The Clouds a few years ago, looks a lot like Deepika Padukone and tries too hard to channel her. That falls flat. But she does get to do a fair bit of action in Yudhra, which she pulls off well. So does Siddhanth, who brings his MC Sher personality from Gully Boy to this film, but struggles with a sketchy, underwritten character.
Yudhra is directed by Ravi Udyawar, the man who helmed the sensitive and powerful Mom — Sridevi’s last outing — a few years ago. About two decades before that, Udyawar directed the Silk Route music video Dooba dooba, that was shot underwater and emerged a clutter-breaker in its time. The man does know a fair bit about substance and style. In Yudhra, he is unable to do justice to either.
