Yaara

The long-delayed Yaara directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia which is now available on Zee 5 is a tasteless gangster drama that can’t evoke any sense of depth. This official remake of the French movie A Gang Story (Les Lyonnais) is placed in an era before the internet revolution. Yaara wants to show a lot of things but doesn’t know how to package them. Thus the distribution of focus makes it extremely dull and Dhulia’s experience in handling subjects with gangster texture never gets a chance to show off.

Phagun and Mitwa are childhood friends who grew up doing a lot of mischievous things. At one pint the young Phagun and Mitwa met this criminal named Chaman who helped them make a fortune by doing smuggling. And during that job, they made friends with Rizwan and Bahadur. The friendship grew strongly, but something unplanned happened and changed their lives completely. The movie is basically about the reunion of the gang and the movie unfolds what happened between them.

The script here is not really building much tension. It is not giving much space even to the important scenes for the audience to mark a particular incident. The movie was shot in 2015, but the treatment and melodrama would feel outdated even if it was released during that time. You don’t get to see enough of a character or incident to root for any of them. When certain deaths happen and our heroes cry out loud, the story wants us to feel for their loss. But the writing just can’t evoke that feeling. This inability of the writing is there throughout the film and all those shadow-filled sepia-toned visuals can’t save the movie from being lifeless.

In most of his films, we get to see Vidyut Jamwal as this action hero who has only one set of expressions. And most of those films only depended on too much action. But here, surprisingly, despite being a gangster film, the focus is more on acting and Vidyut has done an okay job. Amit Sadh plays the role of Mitwa who is always in that unstable state. The excitement and anger of the character are always high and I found the performance a bit too eccentric at times. Leading lady Shruti Haasan is struggling to get into the character. The talented Vijay Varma as Rizwan was fine and Assamese actor Kenny Basumatary has played the role of the fourth friend Bahadur.

Tigmanshu Dhulia who has made acclaimed films in the backdrop of rustic rural India places this one also in a similar backdrop. The visual tone and scene compositions etc have the quality. But the screenplay’s dullness is causing major issues to the film. When you see Phagun looking at his kid and Mitwa’s kid in the climax, we know from where the germ of the idea came. But for that, creating a Jai and Veeru like aura around the friendship was essential; which wasn’t there at any point in the movie. And there is hardly anything original here in the story. The edits weren’t really helping the film in creating the depth. The songs weren’t gelling with the narrative smoothly.

Unlike other Vidyut Jamwal films, one can’t even recommend this movie to someone who is an ardent fan of action. The movie simply skips through events without taking an effort to make them memorable. Yaara is a bland, predictable gangster movie with zero-depth to its credit.

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