There is a disturbing edge to Yudhra that is only slightly explained by the plot. It is clear from how action director Federico Cueva, cinematographer Jay Oza and director Ravi Udyawar staged and filmed the brutal fight scenes that they really enjoyed going so hard. The (superb) night-time gunfight on a cargo ship is the easiest action sequence to watch, mainly because it’s the only one where no one takes a meat cleaver to the face, or worse. For a lot of people this mayhem will be Yudhra’s main appeal, but that’s not the movie’s main point. It wants to be about a young man learning he can be more than other people’s preconceptions, except the fighting is much hotter and heavier than the romance. It’s not often a movie’s tone takes it too far, but Yudhra is the exception that proves the rule.
Yudhra’s father was a vice cop in Mumbai, and right at the start, he and his pregnant wife are killed in a gang hit disguised as a car accident. Doctors save the infant Yudhra by cutting him from his mother’s dead body. Despite concerns over potential brain damage the baby is adopted by his father’s colleague Karthik (Gajraj Rao), despite another colleague, Rehman (Ram Kapoor, whose air of calm and decency grounds the whole movie) having a daughter the same age. In adulthood, Yudhra (Siddhant Chaturvedi) is packed off to military training in the hopes it will quell his violent urges. Yudhra agrees because Rehman’s daughter Nikhat (an excellent Malavika Mohanan) is a medical student in the same town, where they bond via a dance number in an animé-themed nightclub.
But it’s not long until Yudhra is involved in a street fight so brutal that it buys him nearly a year in prison. Nikhat is off to further study in Portugal, so that’s the end of that, until Rehman offers Yudhra an undercover job to bring down the drug dealers that killed his parents and their entire criminal network. Yudhra accepts with enthusiasm and immediately establishes his prison reputation with some disgusting and frankly racist violence.
After prison, the hunt for the dealers is on, including one who Yudhra easily kills the normal way: with a bomb hidden inside a fish on a yacht in the Caribbean. Closer to home there is Firoze (Raj Arjun) and his fey son Shafiq (the mesmerizing Raghav Juyal reprising his role from Kill which came out this spring). They live in a heavily protected glassblowing factory and involve Yudhra in a major cocaine deal with a Chinese triad. Everyone begins double-crossing everyone else and suddenly a password that only Nikhat knows becomes the only thing. It builds to a fight sequence in a Portuguese museum dedicated to musical instruments, where Nikhat, the doctor, fights various henchmen to the death with objects including a corded microphone, cymbals, guitars, and a tin whistle. Meanwhile, Yudhra is racing bikes through the hills of the town and pulling knives out of his body using his teeth while wearing nothing but a yellow bathrobe and smiley-face boxer shorts.
Mr. Chaturvedi is an impressive movie star, whose prettyboy handsomeness makes the seriousness of his action work something of a surprise. Yudhra also has a thing for lollipops not seen in art since Telly Savalas as Kojak. Ms. Mohanan manages to balance Nikhat’s horror of violence with an inventive attitude to fighting that emphasizes her intelligence, unusual to see. The stuntmen clearly had a marvelous time thinking up new ways for everyone to die horribly, and the fire sequence towards the end is especially good. The recurring motif of Mongolian throat singing throughout is another clever surprise and proves unusually effective in emphasizing the movie’s discordant vibe.
So, apart from the disappointment of the racism, it’s disappointing that Yudhra ends with a whimper. Its emotional resolution is only shown as a stinger during the credits. But that is because the movie doesn’t quite know how to contain the dark knowledge on display in the fight sequences. Most fight sequences are filmed with respect and an edge of fear that something could go wrong. Here the sequences of men falling through tables, getting stabbed, having bones broken and enduring horrendous beatings are, frankly, sexual, and it becomes grossly clear just why Yudhra loves trouble so much. Not even the love scenes between Yudhra and Nikhat on a beach are so turned on. It’s that pleasure in pain – causing it and enduring it – that is the main takeaway from Yudhra. And in all honesty, something can be well made but too nasty to watch, in every sense of the term.
Yudhra is now in limited theaters.
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