With his scripts for War, Pathaan and Tiger 3, Shridhar Raghavan has been instrumental in giving the YRF Spyverse a distinct shape and tone. He’s been wonderful for them, but they’ve been the right place for him as well. His plots are simultaneously twisty and ridiculous, the kind that sing if you’re having fun but aren’t meant to be examined in the cold light of day. This works well for YRF’s madcap, winking spy films. But when it’s something like Yudhra—a grittier sort of genre film, for Excel, not in on the joke—the inconsistencies and wild swings are less charming.
Raghavan and director Ravi Udyawar pick a strange metaphor to begin with: a lizard whose tail is chopped off by sadistic schoolboys. It’s rescued by their classmate Yudhra, who takes it home and explains to his only friend, Nikhat, that there’s no need to worry because it can regenerate missing body parts. Yudhra himself seems to regenerate through the film. Though Siddhant Chaturvedi isn’t exactly physically imposing, Yudhra bounces back from all sorts of pain and punishment—shooting, stabbing, drowning—in good enough shape to dish out worse to his enemies.
After his policeman father is killed along with his pregnant mother in a road accident, Yudhra is brought up by his father’s friend, Karthik (Gajraj Rao), a cop who becomes a politician. His anger issues see him sent off to military school—co-producer and dialogue writer Farhan Akhtar’s faith in the army as the ideal fix for wayward youth is unshaken two decades after Lakshya. He doesn’t last long there either, a brawl earning him a court martial and a prison sentence. Before he’s shipped off, Rehman (Ram Kapoor), another of his father’s cop friends, offers him a purpose: help bring down the drug dealers who might have gotten your father killed. Rehman says justice, Yudhra hears revenge.
The first fight in prison typifies the film—violent, fractured, fashionably scuzzy, faintly ridiculous. Yudhra faces off against one of the two gangs in the joint (he wants to impress the other). Before they can attack, he punches himself, slashes his chest, grabs a handful of burning coals, smears hot ash on his face—presumably to show the jailbirds they’re dealing with a real psycho. The subsequent beatdown earns him an audience, months later, with gangster Firoz (Raj Arjun)—his father’s killer’s rival—and his son, Shafiq (Raghav Juyal). Soon, he’s doing hits and brokering drug deals for them while reporting to Rehman (not unlike Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Sheen in The Departed).
What Yudhra lacks in coherence and conviction it somewhat makes up for in constant febrile activity. There’s a new distraction every 10 minutes—Shanghai! Portugal! Coded messages! Shilpa Shukla playing a thinly conceived police chief! It keeps the film from getting boring, even when the efforts to drum up excitement are patently nonsense (one chase sequence has Yudhra in blue briefs and yellow dressing gown in pursuit of Shafiq dressed like a Blaxploitation lead in maroon suit and fur coat). Apart from being a romantic partner for Yudhra and someone he can protect, Nikhat (Malavika Mohanan) has little to do—until she’s forced to defend herself. She’s a medical student, there’s no reason she should be able to take out half a dozen killers. But before you can even process this, the film’s moved on to the next crazy bit.
Of all the scenery-chewing, I most enjoyed Arjun Raj’s bald, bearded kingpin; the calmest of psychopaths, he has something like Pankaj Kapur’s wheeze in Maqbool. Juyal is funny too, though he has much less to work with than he did in Kill. Chaturvedi’s rawness as an action star is reflected in how much creative cutting is resorted to during the fights. He’s still a work in progress, unable to shake the air of self-satisfied cockiness that informs all his characters since his electric debut in Gully Boy.
Both of Udyawar’s films—he made Mom with Sridevi in 2017—have been revenge stories with a nasty edge. His latest is flashier, more flagrantly violent, but Mom was more unsettling. Like so many Hindi genre films, Yudhra lifts liberally from Korean, Japanese and other east Asian cinemas. But it never looks like it's wearing anything but borrowed clothes.
