Siddhant Chaturvedi is a talented actor who played a rapper in Gully Boy as though born to do so. But a typical Hindi film hero, he is not. In director Ravi Udyawar’s Yudhra which means the fight, t is phonetically very close to Yudh, which was the title of Rajiv Rai’s action-musical 1985 blockbuster.
The two films. 49 years apart, are close country cousins. Nothing changes in mainstream Hindi cinema, except the faces, though they continue to express the same range of expressions from A to B. The hero of Udyawar’s scrappily written bonecruncher is remarkably expressionless.
Luckily Siddhant Chaturvedi who plays the titutal bulldozer, has little scope or occasion to act, except in the pre-climax where he presumes his girl (lying inert in a bathtub, having exhausted herself with her overacting) is dead.
Yudhra sobs. The audience in the theatre burst out laughing.
For the rest Chaturvedi clenches his fists grits his pearlywhite teeth and roars towards the villains with bullish energy. He is the umpteenth avatar of Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man and arguably the poorest one yet.
If Chaturvedi is the poor man’s AB, no make that the impoverished man’s Bachchan, then his co-star Malavika Mohanan is the poor man’s Priyanka Chopra. Ms Mohanan is made to walk talk and fight like Ms Chopra. Producers in India who have been missing PC, now have an option.
Mohanan is part of the best action sequence of Yudhra held in Portugal in a music shop where musical instruments are used as weapons. It is an inventive post-interval outburst of violence, and one that made me sit up: there is hope yet. Alas, the corkscrew twist in the climax, endorsing the tradition view that blood is thicker than water, had me squirming in my seat.
When will mainstream Hindi cinema grow up? Or are we destined to suffer streoptypical interpretations of tokenized character—one Muslim cop (played by Ram Kumar who deserves better) and his daughter are desh-bhakts, another Islamic figure is a terrorist and so is his son. The terrorist’s son is played by Raghav Juyal who was so effective as the archvillain in the locomotive driven actioner Kill. Here Raghav’s character is stymied by trite clichés: he wears a nosering and very bright clothes (to match the garishness of the sets every time the Muslim villains are shown relaxing over meals and mayhem).
Raghav probably plays a gay character, although we really can’t tell. This is the kind of film where characters are identified by the number of people they kill.
Yudhra is not all a complete loss. Director Ravi Udaywar demonstrates a flair for mob-driven violence. But it is all done in a void. Some of the characters have sinister agendas. But we couldn’t care less. Yudhra never goes beyond surface gleam and superficial conflict. Sidhanth Chaturvedi delivers a deadpan performance with zero impact in the well choreographed actions sequences. Not every actor is cut out for the rough stuff. Even Manoj Bajpayee failed as an action star in Bhaiya Ji.
