Title: Yudhra

Director: Ravi Udyawar

Cast: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Malavika Mohanan, Raghav Juyal, Ram Kapoor

Where: In theatres near you

Ratings: 2 Stars

Let’s cut to the chase! If style and stunts excite you, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Raghav Juyal’s Yudhra is crafted for you. Director Ravi Udyawar dishes out a promising-looking blood-soaked saga that struggles to reach its optimum potential and ultimately fails to deliver on its promises.

Make no mistake: this tale is stylishly mounted in terms of production design, action choreography, and background score. However, what it fiercely lacks is a story with substance and a protagonist who unleashes his action moves with intention. Siddhant Chaturvedi is sculpted and charismatic. His portrayal of a hot-blooded young man with anger issues is accentuated by the swagger on display. He slams, chops, and shreds anything that comes his way. Despite his innocent face, he makes the character with a dark past believable.

Yet, even more appetizing to watch is Raghav Juyal, playing the baddie with a generous dollop of flamboyance. He delivers another remarkable performance after the success of his last outing, Kill. He plays a freak with ease and impact; however, the writing fails him in this instance.

At 142 minutes, Yudhra lacks brevity. The protagonist's boiling anger is portrayed as a birth defect stemming from a massive tragedy. While his anger is both convincing and convenient (pun definitely intended), how he falls in love and channels his rage to take on an entire drug cartel is a source of much anguish and angst for the audience to decode. The first half is packed with promises and feels breezy, but the second half fails to live up to those promises and becomes sluggish.

There are some high-octane action sequences both on land and underwater, and they stick due to the mastery with which they have been executed.

All in all, you really want Yudhra to reach its peak in terms of action and intention. While you get the former in chunks, you don’t quite get the latter.