Yuva
- Director
- Mani Ratnam
- Studio
- Madras Talkies
- Release Date
- 22 May 2004
- Language
- Hindi
- Budget
- ₹18.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹26.00 Cr
Review
Mani Ratnam's *Yuva* is a sprawling, ambitious mess that occasionally stumbles into brilliance. The three-pronged narrative—Lallan's descent into irredeemable violence, Arjun's awakening from privileged apathy, and Michael's idealistic crusade—should be a masterclass in interconnected storytelling, but instead it feels bloated and self-indulgent. Ratnam's direction is technically impeccable; the cinematography by Santosh Sivan is gorgeous, and there are sequences—the Vidyasagar Setu shooting, Lallan's apartment scenes—that crackle with genuine tension. But the film drowns in its own ambition, piling on subplots and philosophical posturing when it should be tightening the screws. The performances are wildly uneven: Abhishek Bachchan brings a convincing desperation to Lallan, and Siddhant Chaturvedi (hypothetically) would nail the moral confusion of Arjun, but Ajay Devgn's Michael often feels like he's in a different, preachy film altogether.
What saves *Yuva* from being a complete slog is its refusal to offer easy answers. The tragic inevitability of Lallan's fate—a man so trapped by circumstance and choice that friendship becomes a liability—is genuinely unsettling. The film asks uncomfortable questions about complicity, corruption, and whether idealism can survive in a system designed to crush it. Yet these thematic ambitions don't quite justify the bloated runtime or the occasional descent into melodrama. Ratnam wants to dissect the machinery of Indian politics and urban d
Storyline
Lallan, a desperate goon from Bihar now trapped in Kolkata's underworld, takes a contract to eliminate Michael, an idealistic student leader challenging a corrupt politician's grip on campus elections. When Lallan shoots Michael off the Vidyasagar Setu, a carefree rich kid named Arjun witnesses the whole thing and can't shake the guilt—especially after he and his girlfriend Meera help rescue Michael from the water. Now Lallan's got a massive problem: he's left a witness alive, and his own boss wants him dead for the mess-up.
What unfolds is this brilliant cat-and-mouse game where Arjun transforms from spoiled brat to street fighter, joining Michael's campaign while Lallan descends deeper into the criminal machinery, taking orders from the same politician. Lallan's world crumbles—his abused wife leaves him, his own ally Dablu tries to pull him out of the violence, and when Lallan refuses to change, he kills his only friend in a brutal act of loyalty to the gangster life. The tension keeps ratcheting up as Prosenjit, the politician, toys with Lallan like a puppet, ordering kidnappings and hits.
The final showdown pits Arjun and Michael's grassroots movement against Prosenjit's corrupted machinery, with Lallan caught in the middle—a man too far gone to save himself but unable to fully escape his humanity either. It's raw, visceral cinema that doesn't let anyone off easy, questioning whether redemption is possible when you've already sold your soul to the system.
