An aero(un)dynamic flight of fancy starring Sidharth Malhotra
There’s abundant turbulence — tumbling and twisting and rolling and rumbling — in the narrative aspirations of Yodha, the unwieldy Sidharth Malhotra and Raashii Khanna-starrer. Malhotra plays Arun Katyal, a special forces commando serving as the de facto duke of an elite task force. Khanna 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 is a cavalier oneman army just launching himself into perilous extraction missions on whims. Priyamvada is his annoyed, accountabilityseeking wife. A contextsetting opening sequence where Arun neutralises half a dozen Bangladeshi infiltrators somewhere in the Sundarbans (West Bengal) is followed by a generic Vishal Mishra track about the couple’s allconquering romance. Without wasting any time, the film tosses the protagonist into his unmaking: a plane hijack that he fails to prevail over. An enquiry ensues, Arun is found guilty of insubordination and the task force is disbanded.
Attempting to win over both sides and avoiding the jingoistic template is something the Tiger and Pathaan films have attempted before. But Yodha’s complacent coopting of it and surface-level interpretation of the Kashmir issue and terrorism, render this film with nothing new to offer. Ultimately, the plot plunges itself headlong into solving a broad-brushstrokes puzzle of its own making. 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 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, Malhotra’s one-note portrayal of this character, which could have been essayed as conflicted or beleaguered, is distracting. Him cracking whistleworthy one-liners and poorly imitating actor Shah Rukh Khan’s open arms to wheedle his wife makes such characters sloppy and selfabsorbed rather than slick. Khanna 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 selfcentred husband.
It’s disappointing that screenwriters still depend this heavily on dime-a-dozen unhinged antagonists to bring 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 villain ultimately says it for the benefit of everybody in the audience who’ve been sleeping through the film until then. Sunny Hinduja is so ineffective and unoriginal as terrorist Jamal that Malhotra blowing him to shreds in the end offers the viewer no release.
To conclude, a few questions: What purpose does Chittranjan Tripathy’s character serve? How did Blackberrys in 2006 play 1080p video? Where did Patani’s character learn hand combat? (cuz boy, does she beat the shit out of Malhotra). If you can get past these questions, board the flight.