Yuddham Sharanam

A series of bomb blasts takes place in the city engineered by a don Nayak (Sreekanth). Arjun (Naga Chaitanya), a happy-go-lucky youth and an aspiring entrepreneur, is searching for his parents, Murali and Seetha (Rao Ramesh and Revathi), who have gone missing. Then there is JD Shastri (Murali Sharma) has been assigned the task of nabbing the terrorists responsible for the blasts. How are all these people connected? How does Arjun find himself in the crux of a seemingly intractable situation and what does he decide to do?

Yuddham Sharanam may be bracketed into two parts: emotion and action. The first half of the film entirely centers on establishing the characters of the principal players. The bond between Arjun and his family is also established. Rao Ramesh and Revathi do a fabulous job and the roles are a cake walk for them. Lavanya Tripathi as Anjali, Naga Chaitanya’s love interest, looks fresh and cute on screen. But her role is restricted to just that. Sreekanth, in terms of appearance, is entirely convincing as the bad guy. But unfortunately, the role lacks in depth and ultimately disappoints, not giving him scope to perform. Naga Chaitanya does a good job as a loving son and an angry young man and one cannot fault his performance.

Debutant Krishna R Marimuthu handles the emotional drama in the first half but the second half which is action-based fails to impress as it fails to strike an emotional connect. But he is clearly a director with a lot of promise and proof of this is the scene where Arjun makes use of his drone to send medical supplies to an ambulance caught in a traffic jam. That is very innovative, indeed. The back and forth narrative used primarily in the first half works well but does become a tad confusing in the second half. Suffices to say that Yuddham Sharanam and Marimuthu impress with the emotional part but falter with the action drama. All said and done, this one might go down as Naga Chaitanya’s best action-film to date.