Yodha review: Sidharth Malhotra, Raashii Khanna, Disha Patani-starrer is an ‘aero-undynamic’ flight of fancy

Yodha review: Let down by writing and formula filmmaking, this Karan Johar-backed action drama underwhelms and oversimplifies.

Yodha review: A few weeks ago, Fighter director Siddharth Anand suggested that his magnum opus about aerial combat was coming a cropper probably because a high volume of the Indian cinema-going audience had never been on a flight. After Yodha, one of whose meanings is also fighter, I’m sure directors Sagar Ombre and Pushkar Ojha wouldn’t complain about that. (Also Read: Sidharth Malhotra on working in patriotic films: ‘Nothing better than a man in uniform’)

Yodha review: Sidharth Malhotra's film is predictable

It’s because there’s enough turbulence — tumbling and twisting and rolling and rumbling — in the narrative aspirations of this unwieldy Sidharth Malhotra and Raashii Khanna-starrer where you can easily predict the plot (if you cared to).

Sidharth Malhotra and Raashii Khanna in the song Zindagi Tere Naam from Yodha

The premise

Sidharth is Arun Katyal, a special forces commando serving as the de facto duke of an elite task force (duke because his dad, Surender, played by Ronit Roy, formed this unit). Yawn — makers should please think beyond task forces now because they’re a hormonal pre-teen’s dream job. Raashii is his wife, Priyamvada, a senior bureaucrat in the ministry who later becomes secretary to a rather morose and wimpy-looking Indian Prime Minister.

Arun, meanwhile, is a cavalier one-man army just launching himself into perilous extraction missions on whims and returning triumphantly with tricolour smoke grenades billowing behind. Priyamvada is his annoyed, accountability-seeking wife who you sense is always on the verge of sending him divorce papers. A context-setting opening sequence where Arun neutralises half a dozen Bangladeshi infiltrators somewhere in the Sundarbans is followed by a generic Vishal Mishra track about the couple’s all-conquering romance.

Without wasting any time, the film tosses the protagonist into his unmaking: a plane hijack that he just fails to prevail over despite multiple combat sequences in all parts of the flight. An enquiry ensues, Arun is found guilty of insubordination and the task force is disbanded.

Crucial points glossed over

Not that this is its biggest flaw but Yodha is in such a hurry to get to its crash-landing finale crammed with some decent stunt-work, that it glosses over everything else. The script treats its most crucial nerve centres — the protagonist’s fall from grace and the fracture in his relationship with his wife — with such unfeeling imminence and frivolity that you feel sorry for the script’s smug reveal of Disha Patani’s character towards the end. Despite his physical attributes and experience playing decorated war heroes, army men and spies, Sidharth’s one-note portrayal of this character, which could have been essayed as conflicted or beleaguered, is distracting. Him cracking whistle-worthy one-liners and poorly imitating SRK’s open arms to wheedle his wife makes such characters sloppy and self-absorbed rather than slick.

Attempting to win over both sides and avoiding the singularly jingoistic template is something the Tiger and Pathaan films have attempted before. But Yodha’s corny and complacent co-opting of it and surface-level interpretation of the Kashmir issue and terrorism, render this film with nothing new to offer. A ray of hope appears when it’s very briefly suggested that the hero has gone rogue, but even that remote possibility is quickly shushed into a corner. Thereafter, the film plunges itself headlong into solving the broad-brushstrokes puzzle of its own making. I hope the aeronautical explanations and Sidharth’s ability to fight when most people would struggle to take off their oxygen masks in the belly of the plane, passes muster with the experts. But that’s Bollywood for you.

The performances

It’s disappointing that screenwriters still depend this heavily on dime-a-dozen unhinged antagonists to lend menace to their characterisation and give the hero the moral compulsion to completely eviscerate them. “Agar dono mulkon ke beech shaanti samjhauta ho gaya toh hamaara karobar kaise chalega,” the antagonist ultimately says it for the benefit of everybody in the audience who’ve been sleeping through the film until then. Sunny Hinduja (Sandeep Bhaiya, The Family Man) is so ineffective and unoriginal in this role that Sidharth blowing him to shreds in the end offers the viewer no release. Raashii doesn’t really get the full breadth promised to her character in the script, for instance, the chance to be completely at loggerheads with her self-centred husband.

In conclusion

To conclude, a few questions: What purpose does Chittranjan Tripathy’s character serve and why does the actor play a random Punjabi? How did Blackberrys in 2006 play 1080p video? Where did Disha’s character learn hand combat? (cuz boy, does she beat the shit out of Sidharth). Why do the baddies keep talking when they need to shoot? If you can get past these questions, board the flight.

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