21 September,2024 07:23 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from Yudhra
It takes almost an hour for some kinda villain to make an entry in this movie. About 45 minutes for the hero to find any sorta purpose - to his existence on screen; let alone life itself. He'd been plodding through sheer pointless, until then.
I can understand waiting for a movie to end. Can you imagine waiting for the goddamn interval?
Speaking, in particular, of the interval block in this pic - it's a cracker night-light sequence of a shootout on a merchant ship. It's ostensibly set in the Indian Ocean. More likely, shot on Gautam Adani's Mundra port, with bullets flying around containers, apparently loaded with cocaine.
This is scintillating, big-screen action, alright. Enough that you sit up, take note. Only that by this time, the movie has so completely slipped through the cracks - you wonder if it makes any sense to return from the popcorn counter.
Take you to the beginning of this lunacy then? As in the opening scene, where an Army man calls an IPS officer, his subordinate - both of whom, among others, hang out, in uniforms, at a party in the Mumbai Police Gymkhana.
The uniforms bear stars and IPS, on their shoulder epaulettes, but Maharashtra/Mumbai Police on the sleeves. This thorough lack of detailing for a cop-actioner is necessary to highlight. Merely because it foretells the randomness to follow.
Also, it tells us a thing or two about how Mumbai Police are the least likely to take needless offence about stuff on screen. Never mind, being repeatedly portrayed as villains in desi movies/series. Try getting away with anything close to that with the other forces, forget communities.
After the said Mumbai Police Gym party, a prominent officer and his wife get bumped off in a road accident. Their baby, thereafter, grows up as an orphaned child.
He picks up a lizard with help of implements in his '90s Camlin yellow-orange geometry box - only piece of warm nostalgia, in a pic that's trying super hard to hearken back to '80s, mainstream, prologue-plot-epilogue, hero-villain revenge dramas.
This boy is Yudhra, if you must know. He's got severe anger management issues. One way to deal with it is to channel that anger into national service, perhaps. He's sent off to "National Cadate Training Academy".
Ignore the misspelling on screen. What exactly is this force that the hero calls the "military"? You won't care, once you're certain the film's a farce!
But why must you not care as an audience, anyway? Because this movie primarily emanates from second-guessing your tastes/preferences, after all.
That, genre-wise, you seek comfort in the predictable, it appears. How do these filmmakers know this? Surveying so many mad actioners, especially from the South, that killed it at the box-office, post-pandemic.
To be fair, Yudhra wholly avoids latent misogyny that often frames such blockbusters as well. Peeking instead at the Tinder dating culture that the heroine (Malavika Mohanan) has a go at, while being friends with the hero, first.
To be fairer still, the producers, i.e. Excel Entertainment, have put all their might behind high-grade sets/locations/production design. Pumping in crores around which action gets choreographed. The film itself is shot like a dream, although it plays out more as a disjointed nightmare.
Shridhar Raghavan (War, Pathaan, Tiger 3) has scripted this actioner; delivering an altogether breathless narrative. Whether or not you connect with any of the characters, the plot carries on, non-frickin'-stop. Co-producer Farhan Akhtar has put his head to the dialogues. The director, Ravi Udyawar, debuted with the competent Mom (2017).
I'm at the 9 am show, with a R99 ticket, given National Cinema Day - another post-pandemic phenomenon since 2022. Wherein theatres heavily slashed rates (R75) to bring back audiences. It's the one time that the needle moved on multiplex footfalls, across the country.
Sure, it's not a packed hall, this time on. Too early, anyway. There isn't an established superstar shouldering this heavy enterprise, either.
In any case, I suspect there is really no such thing as a proper action-star. Even the biggest ones - Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol, Salman Khan, et al - somewhat started out as romantic heroes, first. Gaining chutzpah, over time.
All eyes on the screen then, that's loading the entry of the young hero as he chases bikers down Mumbai's Eastern Freeway. Who's this Yudhra, yo?
What emerges once the helmet is off, with literally a lollipop for a prop, merging into a Frank Miller-esque image, is actor Siddhant Chaturvedi - Excel's farm-fresh, homegrown talent, who fit beautifully into Gully Boy (2019).
Also, as the GenZ stand-up comedian, devoted to one-night-stands, in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023). I wasn't sure he was quite that dude, with the swag, to floor Deepika Padukone, in Gehraiyaan (2022).
Further convinced he's not really the Bollywood baap-ka-badla kinda orphaned avenger - supposedly thick as a brick; skin made of impenetrable steel - with whistles/hoots across the hall, while he mindlessly bashes the hell out of bumbling baddies, one after another.
God, he's given it his best. To his credit, this would've been a crappy film. Regardless of him.
