A boy born angry – very, very angry – grows up to be a young man prone to flying off the handle at the slightest pretext. He is rusticated from school for nearly killing a classmate. Years later, as a trainee cadet, he beats a man to pulp.
Welcome to the world of the eponymous protagonist of Yudhra, a perpetually fuming guy whose revenge saga begins in the womb of his mother. She dies minutes before the boy is delivered. He carries the burden of that tragedy all through the film although, not surprisingly, it is only one-third of the way in that he learns of the circumstances of his birth.
Residual anger frequently blows up into all-consuming fury. It causes the orphan (played by Siddhant Chaturvedi) much trouble and grief. His well-wishers, colleagues of his deceased police officer-father, have a hard time dealing with his meltdowns.
There are points when his foster-father, Kartik Rathore (Gajraj Rao), his deceased father’s friend in the police force, all but gives up on him. Another police officer, Rehman Siddiqui (Ram Kapoor), always has the boy’s back despite his innate reluctance to give anybody a patient hearing.
Rehman’s daughter, Nikhat (Malavika Mohanan), and Yudhra go back all the way to their childhood. Inevitably, the bond comes to the fore at the business end of the film, when the hero has his back to the wall and has no option but to fight his way out.
Sent to a cadet training academy in Pune after one run-in too many, Yudhra gets into a violent scuffle with a group of civilians ahead of the annual ball on the campus. He is court-martialled and jailed for nine months.
It isn’t his rage alone, everything about the young man is extreme. The prison that he is banished to is “desh ka sabse khatarnak jail“. It is ruled by two rival gangs, one of which reports to the country’s most dreaded drug lord, Firoz (Raj Arjun). He brings the worst – or best, depending on how one looks at it – of him.
Somebody has the bright idea that the ballistic boy would be better off channelising all his ire in the service of the right cause – an anti-narcotics operation. One thing leads to another from here on and Yudhra finds himself in the middle of an all-out war triggered by a missing 5,000-kg cocaine consignment shipped by a Chinese drug cartel.
Yudhra has to battle Firoz and his son unhinged Shafiq (Raghav Juyal) to protect Nikhat Siddiqui. Not that the sprightly lady, a bright student who makes it to a European university on full scholarship, needs any protection. When matters threaten to go out of hand, she, too, swings into action like a seasoned pro.
Yudhra, written by Shridhar Raghavan, directed by Ravi Udyawar and produced by Farhan Akhtar (one of the film’s dialogue writers) and Ritesh Sidhwani, isn’t a film that lacks energy and momentum by any stretch of the imagination. It is crammed with high-voltage action scenes that are dominated by blood and fire, electricity and explosions.
The trouble with Yudhra is that it never pauses for breath. It is relentlessly violent – it certainly isn’t for the faint of heart – but the firepower and constant crackle that the thriller deploys is never enough to ratchet up its intensity to a point where it can grab and hold the audience’s interest over prolonged stretches of time. It clicks only in fits and starts.
The making is, of course, consistently flashy and vigorous. Cinematographer Jay Pinak Oza lends the film the sort of sustained surface sheen that does not wear off even when the tale tilts over into exasperatingly predictable terrain. Editors Tushar Paresh and Anand Subaya do their bit to give the 142-minute Yudhra a degree of pace with their blood-red dissolves and quick cuts when the situation demands.
However, none of the tricks of the technical trade, no matter how well they are harnessed, can rescue Yudhra from its unevenness. The film is stilted, sterile, stale and shallow, if always well short of silly. It never quite has you rooting for the troubled hero.
He is a brooding hunk with a lizard tattooed on his right shoulder. There is a story behind it. As a schoolboy, he rescues a lizard wounded by his classmates, names the reptile Lizzy and develops a deep bond with it. It is one of the creatures that he is attached to that are snatched away from him, leaving him thirsty for vendetta.
The character is meant to spew fire and singe everything and everyone around him. He does just that, but the impact of his violent acts and the series of bereavements that he suffers is not of an abiding nature. The boyish Siddhant Chaturvedi, his visage an impenetrable mask that registers no emotions, does not exude the sort of manic energy that would have made his paroxysms believable.
The crucial reveals, the first one comes at the film’s interval point, are delivered through contrived means that one can anticipate from miles away. The revenge-seeking hero flits from one adversary to another as his target keeps moving, with the unravelling of each new secret.
The male lead’s chemistry with Malavika Mohanan (in her first Hindi film) is feeble. Persistent attempts are made to turn up the heat. They do yield the desired results. The character played by Mohanan is the solitary woman (discounting a cameo by Shilpa Shukla) in a male-dominated film where mother figures are conspicuous by their absence. So, she stands out.
The male protagonist’s mother dies before he is born, the heroine’s father is a widower, policeman-turned-politician Kartik Rathore seems to be single and Shafiq, the grandson of a butcher and the son of a drug dealer, operates in a dehumanised domain where women do not exist.
Does Raghav Juyal make a convincing villain? Not quite. His antics are funnier than they are menacing. Like him, the film blows more cold than hot.
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