Yudhra Is A Pointless Revenge Drama With Nothing To Avenge For

IT IS ODDLY FITTING that Shridhar Raghavan, the writer of Pathaan (2023), has also written the screenplay of Yudhra (2024). If the Siddharth Anand film and its success spawned a fresh batch of tentpole action thrillers then Ravi Udyawar’s sophomore directorial outing and its vacuity make a strong case for their rapid death. Yudhra is one of the most redundant films in a while, and Fardeen Khan and Riteish Deshmukh’s Visfot dropped just a couple of weeks back.

Yudhra (Siddhant Chaturvedi), son of a deceased cop, was born prematurely. Of all the ways this could have manifested in, it gave him anger issues. After the death of his parents in an accident, he is brought up by Karthik Rathore (Gajraj Rao), his father’s colleague who in the coming years becomes a minister. Seeing Yudhra’s untamed rage, another police officer Rehman Siddiqui (Ram Kapoor) hires him as an undercover agent to bust a drug cartel in the city, which is headed by the same group who had killed the latter’s father many years ago.

On paper, Yudhra (Farhan Akhtar and Akshat Ghildial have furnished the dialogues) is designed as a revenge thriller. Technically it unfolds as one, except the tediousness of its runtime, plot and characters exact revenge on us for sitting through it. An obvious false note echoes throughout the film which, if heard with closed eyes, would convince one that what we are watching is dubbed, and not originally, in Hindi.

After Yudhra starts working for Rehman, he gains access to drug lord Firoz (Raj Arjun) and his business. By now, the story, already stretched, forgets about its protagonist’s anger issues. It also forgets how logic works. We see Yudhra, now an agent, freely meeting Rehman and exchanging information. Yet no one from Firoz’s supposed massive team gets a whiff of it, not even his son Shafiq (Raghav Juyal) who is jealous of the love his father showers on the outsider. Meanwhile, Rehman’s daughter, Nikhat (a needlessly hyperactive Malavika Mohanan) and Yudhra fall for each other and a very VFX lizard makes an extended cameo to underline the hero’s tenacity (don’t ask).

This goes on for a while till Yudhra switches to a default mode. Things post-interval just happen. Some characters fly to Portugal (What visa? What money?); we see Chaturvedi cycling in Lisbon and wearing a bathrobe. In the same attire, he kills 20 goons at one go as a disappointed Beethoven stares from a painting. Blood is splashed everywhere and when it does not, the screen fades to red to make up for production cost. And then just when you think it has forgotten about itself, the film ends like it got tired of its own existence.

Having a compelling story in an action film is not a priority. Take Sidharth Malhotra’s Yodha (2024) for instance which feels rudderless without the incentive design of the action sequences. Yudhra, on the other hand, has nothing going for it, least of all its lead. If the outing proves one thing for certain, it is that Chaturvedi has become a lesser actor. Granted that he has little to play with but he also imbues the character with borrowed monotony and moves his face only to give a cocky grin. It is watchable at first and then escalates to being annoying, much like the film.

Yudhra has scanty female officers. Both Yudhra and Nikhat don’t have mothers. There is a sole female officer (Shilpa Shukla) who has a slim screen time. It bothered me at first but then if Nikhat is any proof, a character so beholden to the male protagonist that she promptly accompanies him everywhere and forgets she is a student at a university, then the absence is a strategic move. It spares us and them.