There is a specific kind of digital glare on Sidharth Malhotra’s teeth in the second act of "Yodha" that kept pulling me out of the cockpit. If I'm honest, the entire visual palette feels like it was graded by an intern who just discovered the teal-and-orange slider in DaVinci Resolve and decided to hold it down until the screen bled. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time the camera pushed in for a dramatic closeup that didn't earn its focal length. We are trapped in a silver tube at thirty thousand feet with a bunch of very agitated men holding automatic weapons, yet the lighting insists on looking like an automobile commercial shot in suburban Noida.

Directors Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha treat the airplane fuselage less like a claustrophobic trap and more like a gym where choreography happens. The screenplay is a series of plot points duct-taped together with flashbacks that arrive without warning, crashing into the middle of gunfights like an unskippable YouTube ad. You get a sense that someone cut twenty minutes of connective tissue out of the middle reel during a late-night editing session, leaving jagged narrative scars that characters have to leap over with giant expository dialogue drops. It lacks the lean, ruthless geography that Neeraj Pandey brought to "Baby," preferring instead to spray CGI shrapnel across the frame and hope the noise covers up the gaping logic holes.

Sidharth Malhotra plays Arun Katyal with the emotional range of a very handsome filing cabinet. He spends most of the runtime squinting into the middle distance while wearing a tactical vest that looks three sizes too expensive for his frame. There is an absolute lack of sweat in scenes where his character is supposed to be dangling from the landing gear of a falling aircraft, which is impressive in a biological sense but terrible for suspension of disbelief. Raashi Khanna tries to inject some actual authority into her role as a bureaucrat stuck on the ground, but she is constantly undermined by scenes where she has to stare intensely at a laptop monitor that is clearly displaying a desktop screensaver. Disha Patani shows up in a uniform that defies military regulation in ways that probably required special approval from the costume department, throwing kicks that are edited so fast you can only see the blur.

Arun Katyal plays the disgraced commando who must redeem his family name by single-handedly stopping a hijacking, which is a premise that Bollywood movies have recycled since the days of "Sholay" without finding anything new to say about patriotism or military bureaucracy. Shivangi Bhardwaj appears in the periphery as a supporting player whose dialogue sounds entirely dubbed in a basement studio three months after principal photography wrapped, complete with room echo that doesn't match the pressure-cabin acoustics. Arun Katyal is accused of treason in the first reel because his father made a bad call, and the film expects us to care deeply about this multi-generational honor code even though the script barely pauses to explain why the court-martial board was so thoroughly convinced of his guilt. The background score by Ketan Sodha hits the low brass every single time someone walks down a corridor with purpose, hammering the tension until it flattens into predictable white noise.

There is no subtext here, just text shouted over a jet engine. The thematic core attempts to wrestle with the concept of institutional betrayal versus rogue heroism, but it treats both sides with such broad, cartoonish strokes that you stop caring who is the traitor and who is the patriot about twenty minutes before the descent begins. When Arun finally delivers his big monologue about duty to the tricolor, it lands with a wet thud because the filmmakers forgot to build any actual human cost underneath the special effects. We see plenty of explosions, plenty of slow-motion shell casings hitting the metal floor, and plenty of actors striking poses that look great on a billboard along the Western Express Highway.

The cinematography by Jomon T. John relies heavily on swirling drone shots that swoop around the aircraft exterior like a drunken mosquito, completely losing track of where the sun is supposed to be positioned in the sky. One minute it is golden hour over the Arabian Sea, and the next cut has the plane cruising under harsh, midday studio lights that flatten every contour of the actors' faces. This kind of visual inconsistency is becoming standard across mainstream Hindi cinema, where spectacle is generated by volume rather than precision.

I can't tell you how many times the exact same brass sting played whenever a character made a sudden realization about the hijackers' true identity, because after the fourth repetition I stopped keeping count. It is a minor editorial laziness that accumulates over two hours, grinding down whatever genuine suspense the aerial set-pieces manage to generate on their own. By the time the third act spirals into a ridiculous fistfight inside a cargo hold where gravity seems to negotiate its terms scene by scene, the movie has long since abandoned any pretense of realism and settled into pure, exhausting nonsense.

Malhotra has the physical stature for an action lead, but he needs directors who will force him to drop the posture and look genuinely wrecked by the violence around him. Instead, he remains pristine, his hair holding its gel through depressurization and bullet spray alike, a monument to star-image management that overrides the messy realities of the genre he is trying to conquer.