Yudhra Movie Star Cast/ Actors: Siddhant Chaturvedi as Yudhra Rathore, Malavika Mohanan as Nikhat Siddiqui, Raghav Juyal as Shafiq, Gajraj Rao as Karthik Rathore, Ram Kapoor as Rehman Siddiqui, Raj Arjun as Firoz, Shilpa Shukla as Renuka Bharadwaj & More
Yudhra Movie Director: Ravi Udyawar
Yudhra Movie Release Date: September 20, 2024
Yudhra Movie Available On: Theatrical Release and (likely to be released on OTT Platform Prime Video)
Yudhra Movie Released/ Available In Languages: Hindi
Yudhra Movie Runtime: 141 Minutes
Yudhra Movie Critic Review:
Director Ravi Udyawar’s outing with Sridevi in her last film Mom was handled with delicacy. Even a gang rape in it was filmed with finesse – a top shot that was impactful without graphic visuals. Therefore, when he begins his latest film with aggressive red all over the screen and the long shot of an exploding ship at sea, it seems like Udyawar has embarked on another stylish fare.
It does take off well. At the Police Gymkhana in Mumbai, seniors pat upright police officer who has doggedly chased a dangerous narcotics gang. It’s a closeknit police team with colleagues Rehman (Ram Kapoor) and Kartik (Gajraj Rao) looking on with affection. Seconds later, the upright officer and his pregnant are killed in a road collision, his infant son born without oxygen supply for the first five minutes of his life. It foretells brain damage to the baby who grows up into an uncontrollably violent Yudhra, a schoolboy with the weird taste for wounding a lizard and carrying around the tailless reptile as a pet, with Rehman’s daughter Nikhat, his understanding classmate and friend.
His introduction as young man Yudhra (Siddhant Chaturvedi) is energetically shot on a bike, throwing a discarded bottle back into the car that’s chucked it, doing wheelies and driving the cops crazy. Indulgent “Dad” Kartik who’s brought him up and has moved from the police force into politics, keeps bailing him out of trouble.
After sparing the road and spoiling the brain-damaged Yudhra, Kartik packs him off to the National Cadets Training Academy (never mind if Cadets is spelt ‘Cadates’) in Pune to channelise his aggression. Rehman approves of the move as daughter Nikhat (Malavika Mohanan) is there too, in a medical college. Too pat?
Credit the convoluted story and screenplay to Shridhar Raghavan (with contribution from Farhan Akhtar and Akshat Ghildial) as Udyawar soon slides into the predictable and the feeble. As if Yudhra’s brain-damaged aggression was not enough, more quirky characters Firoz (Raj Arjun), son Shafiq (Raghav Juyal with a diamond nose stud) and several unknowns are brought in and out. Nikhat is the annoyingly familiar girl with attitude. Shilpa Shukla also makes an appearance as senior cop Renuka Bhardwaj, in a weak attempt to muddle the plot
further.
Set action pieces roll out one after the other. One in Pune too, which gets Yudhra court martialled. True to pattern, it soon unspools – unsurprise – that Yudhra’s parents’ accident was actually a murder. Yudhra is unleashed to go after his parents’ killer. But you soon guess that the master criminal is someone else. Given the mindset of Hindi filmmakers, it isn’t tough to guess in which group the epitome of wickedness resides.
Udyawar moves from Pune to the Bahamas where a Mallya-like villain hides (with babes aboard a yacht), then to Sri Lanka to catch Yudhra in a lungi, a stop somewhere in the sea for a consignment of cocaine that disappears, off to Portugal for more fights, topped off with a climax in Vizag.
With dialogues like ‘Baat se pehle laat’ and lyrics that go ‘Behki behki,mehki mehki’, lifeboats are in desperate need to rescue the laboured drugs-and-baddies story. There is one in the polished camerawork (Jay Oza), a cleverly hidden password and a couple of well-choreographed action pieces like the sequence inside a jail where blood is spilt, bones are crushed, and hands are stitched while an elderly tailor calmly goes about his work on a sewing machine.
But Shankar-Ehsan-Loy’s music is a letdown with three unlistenable numbers. Two club songs (one each for Yudhra-Nikhat and Shafiq) and a romantic beach number (a mood offender when it interrupts what’s supposed to be tense action time), lengthen the storytelling without adding anything to it.
There are also unnecessarily long sequences like the one where Firoz narrates the whole screenplay of the master criminal to Yudhra. Siddhant Chaturvedi is slick in action scenes while Raghav Juyal and Raj Arjun are wasted as
the freakish father and son.
Yudhra Movie – Watch Or Not?: Skippable.
Yudhra Movie Review Score Rating: 2 out of 5 (i.e. 2/5)
Yudhra Movie Official Trailer:
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