Yudhra Review: When Style Meets Stereotype

There are so many loopholes in this lazily scribbled plot, it could be a different movie and still as crummy, observes Sukanya Verma.

Voiceover openings by a mortally wounded protagonist sinking into air, water or earth in poetic slow motion and sharing the events leading on to that point are such cliched imagery, one could predict the story about to play out on screen sitting in one’s living room.

Mom Director Ravi Udyawar's Yudhra is a classic case of style meets stereotype.

There's oodles of slick action and eye candy boosting its comic-book visual pizzazz but Sridhar Raghavan's formulaic screenplay and jumbled storytelling tells a lot about the half-hearted effort gone in reducing a potentially badass jaunt into a run-of-the-mill exercise.

Having lost his folks in a road accident while he was still in his mum's tummy, Yudhra (Siddhant Chaturvedi) grows up harbouring anger issues as a side-effect of his traumatic birth.

A good five minutes of his childhood flashback involves closeups of a rescued CGI lizard and the delinquent tendencies it triggers when rubbed off the wrong way.

For reasons best known to Raghavan, Yudhra has foster daddy issues the size of Bachchan in Shakti or Sharaabi, which are as confounding to us as they are to his floundering father figures (Gajraj Rao and Ram Kapoor) in the absence of any real provocation.

Skimming through one chapter after another as reckless biker, court-martialled cadet and undercover agent yet finding enough time to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart, Nikhat (Malavika Mohanan/s awkward initiation in Bollywood's vacuous arm candy roles), Yudhra’s wayward journey stops not once to make sense.

There are so many loopholes in this lazily scribbled plot, it could be a different movie and still as crummy.

Fully paid scholarships to major in a branch of science where students carry designer purses not backpacks to school is not nearly as mind boggling as one of its biggest pre-intervals twists that's barely addressed and never confirmed.

Kids and their doll games convey more coherence than the erratic manner Yudhra's characters are written and pitted against each other.

Like 'cops won't be a problem in Portugal', a drug lord tells his son before directing him to catch the first flight and gatecrash Yudhra and Nikhat's canoodling session by the beach.

He's right.

Even after so much destruction, gun firing, bloodshed, locals turning casualty, no cop shows up.

Back in India too, things are dedicatedly slack.

Ambulances arrive without as much a peep but police vans are nowhere to be found.

Wouldn't be that much of a big deal if this movie didn't have cops as key protagonists.

And no matter how kinetic the action is, there's no real emotion fuelling the violence.

Brash for the heck of it, Yudhra's temper issues are long forgotten as he courts trouble in a Pune prison that looks like Alcatraz from the outside and Rajiv Rai's imagination inside.

Aiming for a cross between Sanjay Dutt's bad boy charisma and Suniel Shetty's raw rage, the machismo put forth by Siddhant in and as Yudhra is all too familiar and '90s in its sensibility. Except he's played the cocky guy so many times now, the characterisation needed a lot more than licking lollipops to give it an edge.

Ditto for the villains Firoz (Raj Arun) and Shafiq (Raghav Juval). Whatever little attraction their menace holds is purely surface level.

Raj Arun's quiet ferocity is a mood waiting to have its moment while Raghav Juval's choreographer skills are happy to burn the dance floor in killer moves and kitschy styling.

The Kill baddie is the only one to have figured out the key to Yudhra's sleek nonsense and letting his hair down while at it.

As drug kingpins, Firoz and his son Shafiq have little to offer by way of purpose. Rather, it is one's quirks and another's queerness that lend them some semblance of character.

Typical, isn't it?

Glamorising hypermasculinity to the hilt while disguising its innate Islamophobic and homophobic mindsets where portraying those on the fringes as troublemakers or tyrants is usually the norm.

What would be truly subversive is when a gay action hero stands up to a straight majority of offenders and takes forward the feverish fervour of the action genre to diverse, defiant places.