Samantha Ruth Prabhu is heartbreaking in Yashoda for all the wrong reasons, she makes a foetal error

Critical objectivity be damned. It is very difficult to say negative things about Samantha Ruth Prabhu’s cinema at this point in her career when she has hit all-time low in her personal life. I so want to say, Samantha is making the right moves. Tragically her new release Yashoda (Telugu, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) proves otherwise. This is an unbelievably awful film, on top of my list of this year’s worst. To say it does disservice to the lovely Samantha who is struggling to rebuild her career would be an understatement. This trashily scripted travesty of filmmaking insults Samantha as well as some of the other actors whom I have seen in much better circumstances. This is the kind of cinema that even Katharine Hepburn would find hard to live down. The plot—deep breath, here goes—is about a fertility hospital devoted to surrogate motherhood where some real cheesy hanky-panky is going on. Samantha plays a pregnant surrogate. Not very bright, I’m afraid. But isn’t that self-explanatory? If Yashoda had any brains would she get into the racketeers’ web? (Related question: if we had any intelligence would we sit through this tale of embryo vandalism?). Knowing of the growing danger to her life and to the child she is carrying, she stubbornly visits what they call ‘Zone B’ in the hospital where all the nasty activities happen. When she is not snooping around Yashoda is brazenly flirting with her doctor Gautham (Unni Mukundan) asking him why he is single when he is so handsome (subtlety is in short supply in this hospital)) and telling him why she prefers barfi to chocolates. (We prefer her in _Super Deluxe_ than in garbage like this). All this flirting is meant to be the script’s quote of courtship before the action kicks in. Samantha gets to do a lot of kickass action, all staged in the notorious Zone B. There is one fight in the pantry where Yashoda(heavily pregnant) takes a sister-inmate. Knives fly. Time doesn’t. Yashoda can fight. Right, but can anyone fight the barrage of brainless episodes that pour out of the screen like a sloppy soap opera? It is baffling why Samantha agreed to do this film, more so since Varalaxmi Sarath Kumar has the meatier more interesting role. She plays Madhubala, the resident vamp who wants to stay young forever. Varalaxmi seems to have fun with her vamp’s role.

Samantha on the other hand, seems miserable, having been caught on the wrong foot. She looks thoroughly unconvinced about the plot. We can’t blame her. There is nothing to get a grip on in this slippery embryonic excursion which seems to tell women: be careful before you allow yourself to get pregnant. Crappy…sorry, copy that. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.