Yogi Da Movie Review: A toothless women empowerment film

Yogi Da Movie Review:

In the opening minutes of Singam 2, Duraisingam (Suriya), an undercover cop who is now an NSS teacher in a school, risks compromising his cover to pummel a local gangster who insults the national anthem. More than a hero elevation mass moment, the scene helps build drama and mystery around Duraisingam's personality. There is a similar scene in Sai Dhanshika's Yogi Da, where police officer Yogeshwari loses her cool over an insult to the national flag. She decides to make mincemeat of the henchmen. She does accomplish that rather stylishly, but to what avail? We never really know. Director Goutham Krishna is more focussed on placing whistle-worthy moments in every scene, but falls way short of giving us a character worth whistling for.

Yogi Da begins with Yogeshwari (Sai Dhanshika) ransacking a wine shop to nab an accused in Coimbatore. Since the shop belonged to someone influential, she gets transferred to Chennai. Her uprightness squares off against the crimes of Jawahar Babu (Kabir Duhan Singh). How she manages to utter 'Yogi Da' almost every time after overcoming artificially laid obstacles in her path to outsmart Babu is what the rest of the film is about.

To the positives first, Sai Dhanshika looks effortless while performing the stunts, which would seem right in place in any mass Tamil film featuring our superstar heroes. But unfortunately, the positives end there, and the film's biggest blind spot is that the plot is upholstered around showcasing her physical prowess, giving her nothing to chew on as a performer. Similar to the contrivance of whistle-worthy moments, the film doesn't look to be invested in the message it claims to send across. When a woman officer (not the bad commissioner, but the protagonist) yells at her subordinates to 'drape a saree' for being unable to nab the accused, it is not helping the women's empowerment cause. While this is just one scene and one line, the shoddy screenplay that follows doesn't elide the imprint it left.

Kabir Duhan Singh's Jawahar Babu could have been a convincing antagonist if the writing prolonged his momentary flair. In a scene meant to remind us of Rajinikanth's swag while smoking in his police station in Moondru Mugam, Jawahar, who keeps calling Yogi 'pombala police' in condescension, tells her not to smoke as it will affect her uterus. This scene elucidates the kind of misogynist Babu is and how he reductively views women as child-producing machines. More work in these spaces could have interwoven the clash of ideas with the mundane fist fights. But director Goutham Krishna, in his box-ticking women empowerment exercise, has no time for such nuances.

Cast: Sai Dhanshika, Kabir Duhan Singh, Sayaji Shinde, Manobala

Director: Goutham Krishna

The film still had the potential to become an average potboiler if the makers decided to not rush the narrative. Rather than operating the narration around one big crime that ensues a cat and mouse game between Jawahar and Yogi, we get broad strokes of Jawahar supplying methamphetamine, philandering, and browbeating his opponents. None of these stays and sticks. There are many ideas that should have been discussed and executed with better flair rather than taking the first idea and running with it. Be it the shoddy logic of Jawahar playing carrom board in an abandoned factory, or a corrupt minister (Sayaji Shinde) walking straight into an age-old trap, many such scenes were first draft ideas at best.

After exhausting police movie templates, and not doing a great job of it, the filmmaker decides to make the antagonist do the same-old tricks to hurt the protagonist. If it were a male protagonist, his love interest or family members would get kidnapped, but since it is a woman, things always revolve around her gender. This film reinforces the norm that female heroes are punished through sexual violation. That becomes less of an issue when Yogi is made to repress her feelings of hurt in the subsequent scenes. The goal was supposed to make the female protagonist rise above an injustice inflicted on her while letting her feel wronged and hurt. Yogi Da, instead, makes its protagonist cold and indifferent, which is an insensitive take.

With its cloying commitment, Yogi Da reduces women’s equality to a caricature. It turns the protagonist into a performative symbol rather than a fully lived character. Instead of simply going about her business—casually and convincingly breaking gender stereotypes—the film accentuates every transgression, as if she must constantly announce, “I am a woman doing what women are not supposed to do.”