Dear readers, the most generic movie of the year is here. Yodha, directed by Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha is more predictable than the results of the upcoming general elections. It has Sidharth Malhotra leading the show, who gets a perfect platform to showcase the brawn and good looks in a patriotic film that wants peace on both sides of the border and blames the fundamentalists for making it ‘business’ out of terror. The hijack drama faces too much turbulence in the course of two hours and the landing of the story is equally bumpy.
Sidharth Malhotra plays Arun Katyal, a trained commando of a special task force called Yodha, which was formed by his late father (Ronit Roy in a cameo), who has a knack for not following orders. On one such mission, his impulsive decision to act quickly costs the nation the life of a treasured scientist. Arun’s beloved Yodha task force gets dismantled and his marriage to his bureaucrat wife Priyamvada (Raashii Khanna) also hits rock bottom. Years later, Arun finds himself again on an aircraft that has been hijacked. But all isn’t as clear as it should be. There’s a helpful but mysterious air hostess (Disha Patani), a desi uncle, a curious trainee pilot, and a suspicious bearded man – all are suspects in Arun’s eyes and before the plane heads towards its ultimate target in Islamabad – where India and Pakistan are holding peace talks – Arun has to clear his name, save the 200 passengers and the leaders of the two nations.
Despite the multiple twists the writing is so predictable that you know how the story will pan out, which moment in the film will be used as a flashback later, which character will die, and who will go rogue. That’s not ideal for a hijack thriller.
When the writing fails to create thrills, the screenplay tosses the passengers and makes the plane go upside down just to create excitement.
Sidharth Malhotra gets to flex his muscles and look angsty at regular intervals. Malhotra’s character Arun Katyal is perhaps the only character in the film that has been written decently. Malhotra’s Katyal is a breaker of rules but a brave soldier who would go to any length to save his country. It’s not a role that requires a lot of acting and Malhotra delivers his part well. Unfortunately, writer Sagar Ambre does not invest much time in defining other characters, so they all seem very disconnected from Arun – even though they are all integral to his story. Some of the actors have nothing to do in the film except look at the screen wide-eyed in horror or shock.
The look of bewilderment is constant in the film. At regular intervals, each actor displays the same shocked expression looking far into the space or the monitor. It’s like the director duo had a standard rule for all the actors on board that plane.
Garbed as a patriotic film, Yodha then takes the middle path and blames the terrorists and the system instead of the two warring nations. The result is a middling film that only holds your attention in parts and mostly is so generic that you will forget it the moment you step out of the theatre. It has its staple love song, a line or two for the country and how it’s a ‘business’ for terror outfits to create animosity between India and Pakistan – basically all the things that we have already heard and been shown in other films.
The moments pictured inside the aircraft when the hijack takes place still have a certain amount of thrill and mystery, but after a point become predictable and slightly incoherent.
Watch Yodha only if you are a fan of Sid Malhotra. He looks fine and fights single-handedly a building full of terrorists and comes out of a blast unscathed.