Yodha Movie Review: Sporadically exciting actioner tries to be the hijack of all trades

Yodha can best be defined as an overly simplistic film morphing into an overly complicated film. When we meet Indian soldier Arun Katyal (Sidharth Malhotra), he is on a covert mission with his team at the Indo-Bangladesh border. A bunch of insurgents, with wobbly Bangla, are huddled in a hut, conspiring to cross the border. Civilians are at risk. The team is on their watch, awaiting orders from the high command (Spoiler: they aren’t gonna come). You can guess what our hero is going to do (“Yodhas don’t know how to negotiate”). He takes a headshot, assembles a make-shift zipline and crashes into the hut. Then he kills off all the terrorists in a well-imagined but sloppily-executed action sequence. Punches, knives, guns, assault rifles, almost everything is used. The camera spins more than slithers as Malhotra breaks arms and stabs thighs. This is a pattern with Yodha, stuffing every scene, be it action or not, in order to elevate it. Arun ultimately saves the day, uncorks a flare light and the colours of the Tiranga are flowing in the wind. Nationalism out and out whenever in doubt.

Directed by: Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha

Starring: Sidharth Malhotra, Raashii Khanna, Disha Patani, Ronit Roy

To give some context, Arun Katyal is part of an elite Yodha squad, which has the “best of Military, Air Force and Navy.” The squad is close to his heart since it was formed by his father Surender Katyal (Ronit Roy). In a corny flashback scene, Surender puts the uniform on young Arun’s shoulders as they both gleam into the mirror. As expected, soon after only Surender’s trunk makes it home. A determined Arun then vows to take forward his father’s legacy.

Not for long. After a failed rescue mission, which leads to hijackers killing off the country’s “top nuclear scientist”, the Yodha unit is disbanded. Arun is shamed for flouting orders and is labelled a traitor. His wife Priyamvada (Raashii Khanna), a government officer, has also served him divorce papers. In the film’s first half, too many things happen too fast. Some scenes act as mere fillers. Nothing is allowed to settle. It feels like the film is impatiently trying to get somewhere. Like it has some aces up its sleeve. Like it’s telling you, sit through some cliches, the best is yet to come.

Flash forward to a vague, “Few years later” and now we have Arun, bearded, wearing black shades and smoking a cigarette while looking at an aeroplane through a glass pane. Is he going to hijack a plane to take revenge against the bureaucratic system which wronged him and his team? From here, the film does become nail-bitingly thrilling. A tainted soldier is claiming that the flight is going to be hijacked, should we believe him? Has he gone rogue? A burly, bald guy gets killed and turns out he wasn’t the hijacker. On the plane, there is an over-smart teenager, a loud-mouthed uncle and a clueless airhostess (Disha Patani), so who’s it gonna be?

I liked some of the ideas Yodha brought to the table. It mixes mystery with the hijack-thriller and it pumps up the film for a while. Some action sequences, like a fight inside a plane spinning and nosediving or the one in the flight’s cargo unit with temperatures dropping, felt novel. But it soon gives in to the gravitational pull of the scrappy thriller. Some details don’t quite add up. There are twists and turns as if this is an Abbas-Mustan potboiler. Is there a bomb on the flight? Is the flight the bomb? Is the Indian PM the target? Is the Pakistan PM the target? Were my brain cells the target? Yodha doesn’t realise when its 'gotcha' moments start becoming increasingly convoluted. But before you can rearrange the events in your head, before you can let it settle and make sense of it, the flare is out again. Look, a tricolour.