‘Yudhra’ Review: Violence, Gore and Checklist Storytelling

Director: Ravi Udyawar
Writer: Shridhar Raghavan
Cast: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Malavika Mohanan, Raj Arjun, Raghav Juyal, Gajraj Rao, Ram Kapoor, Shilpa Shukla
Language: Hindi

Watching Yudhra is like watching a guy who travels for the sake of travelling. He hits all the tourist spots only because that’s what people do. It’s a terse schedule: reach, click photos at landmarks, leave, repeat. He is indifferent to the joy of exploring — the checklist is a chore. Angry young man? Check. Adopted? Check. Revenge for dead parents? Check. Blood and gore? Check. Childhood sweetheart? Check. Going undercover to bring down a powerful drug syndicate? Check. Father-son villain duo? Check. Twist you can see coming from miles away? Random voice-over? Check and check.

Ravi Udyawar’s action thriller sleepwalks through its exotic journey. At times, it lets out such an audible sigh that you can hear it go: “Do we have to?” It doesn’t commit to any of the aforementioned tropes, almost as if it’s in a hurry to get things done with. When the hero is presumed dead, his recovery montage in a fishing village is so quick that you wonder if it actually happened. His comeback is mechanical; the baddies barely bat an eyelid. Compare this to similar re-intro arcs in Jawan (2023) or even Koyla (1997), and the lack of mainstream rhythm jumps out. It’s often an out-of-body experience: the characters speak in Hindi, but it still sounds like another language. In fact, Yudhra ends so abruptly that it feels like the film simply got tired of its own company and stopped. Selfie in the airport lounge before the flight home? Check.

The 140-minute slugfest has all of two stylistic moments. When Yudhra proposes to childhood friend Nikhat (Malavika Mohanan) on a Pune footpath, the couple hears loud clapping, only to realise that it’s two rickshaw drivers grounding tobacco in their hands. When pulpy violence wrecks a Beethoven-themed store, a flute belts out a tune after being jammed into the windpipe of an attacker.

Even narratively, there are glimpses of the campy-cool entertainer that Yudhra might have been. For instance, early on, Yudhra’s parents — a super-cop and his pregnant wife — are driving home in a retro and rainy Bombay. They’re happy, so of course, they’re going to die. After the fatal accident, a pensive doctor informs the family friends that the baby did survive, but with the caveat: his body didn’t receive enough enriched blood from the mother.

It’s a cheeky detail because this baby grows into a man who is defined by his bloodlust. This is also the Bollywood-medical way of saying that Yudhra will be ‘satkela’ (Mumbai slang for “unhinged”) forever. Visual translation: he sucks on a red lollipop (just go with it, okay?), and the screen bleeds when he’s on the brink of Hulk-smash rage. He’s also a red flag for women, but never mind. It’s a dark superhero arc of sorts. Yudhra is essentially a monster who must find a better use for his madness. It’s why his mentor, an anti-narcotics officer named Rehman Siddiqui (Ram Kapoor), convinces him to infiltrate a drug ring during his nine-month-long prison stay. It’s a track straight out of The Departed (2006).

As you can tell, I’m clutching at straws, references and metaphors here. Why nine months, you ask? Because he is ‘reborn’ on the right side of the law. Yudhra wins the trust of kingpin Firoz (Raj Arjun) by passing a fellow inmate’s hand through a sewing machine and finishing off a rival on a yacht in the Bahamas. No big deal. The master plan goes awry when Firoz’s jealous son, Shafiq (Raghav Juyal) starts to lash out. A lot of this revolves around 5,000 kilos of missing cocaine, a potential double-crosser, and a lizard without a tail. Just kidding. The surprisingly handsome lizard appears in Yudhra’s childhood. At one point, I thought I saw a whale too, but that was just the hull of a ship.

Despite playing a reptilian hero-cum-spy, Siddhant Chaturvedi delivers a strangely inert turn. He can dance and look and fight, but Yudhra lacks the swag of a benevolent maniac. Perhaps the problem is that his character is not too different from Firoz and Shafiq. They’re all equally crazed; it’s just that Yudhra has to appear ‘saner’ by virtue of being on the other side. Both Raj Arjun and Raghav Juyal might be typecast as go-to performative baddies, but at least they chew into the ham-and-cheese setting. They go so wild with their wonky gestures and quasi-queer tone that one almost forgets the film’s subscription to the good-Muslim-bad-Muslim template. The good news is that Yudhra isn’t driven by some misplaced sense of native pride. Even during his cadet training course, he remains a man trying to tame his personal demons.

The bad news is that once actioners like these go downhill, our suspension of disbelief starts to crumble. We begin to get distracted by primal loopholes of logic and logistics. We obsess with the little details and questions that the filmmaking is designed to protect. Like why does Sohni Lagdi look like a nightclub song added solely to ride Vicky Kaushal’s Tauba Tauba wave? Why does the shot of a villain melting in lava look like an edgy mango-shake advert? What kind of visa is Yudhra on when he reaches Portugal to romance Nikhat after nearly dying twice minutes earlier? What kind of visa (and tour package) is gangster Shafiq on when he waltzes into Portugal in a fur coat and red shades? Does nobody in Portugal care that a bunch of South Asians shoot at each other and destroy public property on a perfectly sunny day?

And why does Yudhra call an Indian politician for help to fly back to Mumbai after he leaves a trail of carnage across Europe with zero consequences? Given the pitch of the story, he can just swim back. (It’s not even like he calls to escape; he’s already chilling at a resort by then.) The point is that a film can’t suddenly consider red tape and rules and borders after operating on vibes until then. But that’s just how Yudhra is. The joyless traveller does whatever it takes to finish the trip and go home. Sometimes, it’s the very home that movies ask you to leave your brains at.