“Joddha: The Warrior of Life” (2025) presents itself as a big rags-to-riches story full of determination and personal triumph, but without any great thematic maturity to support the storytelling. It’s a story about finding strength within oneself when the world offers none, but told in a way that makes the overall theme childishly unimportant in the broader form of storytelling. “Joddha” opens with a tumultuous and dramatic setting – of a stormy night in which a family has been abandoned by the patriarch. We don’t know why. His family side soon disowns them as well.
Now, without giving much context about the tragedy that has just unfolded, the film is quick to focus on the helplessness of the family, consisting of the mother and three children. In the first few minutes the suffering of the mother (Mala Goswami) is depicted. She does odd jobs in and around the area to support children’s education. Later, the story shifts to the perspective of the eldest son and his struggles as his motivations are highly developed to extreme levels, so as to capture the pain and struggle of the family.
For example, as an innocent school-going boy, he faces constant bullying simply because his mother works as a domestic help. Later, he also left school and took on the responsibility of taking care of a school-going girl in the neighborhood and her needs to contribute to the family income and support his mother. But the presentation of the entire set of events is too exaggerated, and happens too quickly, hastened by montages and flashbacks, to produce any final impact.
He also challenges an illegal enforcer who threatens his mother for being unable to repay her loans. So, you can see that the risks are there and very intense as well, but the problem is that they are artificially manufactured and captured in a state of cruel emotional emptiness. This cruelty makes the film’s pacing difficult. The treatment is melodramatic, the acting forced, and so is the feeling.
As the child grows up, Rajkumar Talukdar begins doing small jobs to support the family, such as working at a nearby petrol pump. During this time, his honesty and dedication attract the attention of a local gangster, who takes him under his wing. Under his supervision, the boy quickly rises to new heights. However, when a criminal case is filed against his mentor, the godfather is forced to flee the country (only to return towards the film’s climax). So, just like the family background and dynamics at the beginning of the film, the narrative abandons the mentor-protégé plot as well.
After that, the story shifts to a romantic subplot, and like the protagonist, the film also loses focus on the story it wants to tell. The romantic angle carries the same old duality as old Hindi films, such as the loyal childhood friend on the one hand, and the deceitful femme fatale on the other. The female characters are played by Aleshmita Goswami and Kajal Sharma respectively. It is clear that after being deceived in love, the protagonist turns to his childhood sweetheart, whom he has ignored for a long time, and without asking for any justification, she accepts him, because she loved him all along. The film’s female characters, from mother to lover, serve only as catalysts in the man’s story of struggle, change, and redemption. But perhaps true love is above all notions of sex and politics.
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The arc of redemption and the protagonist’s rise to extreme professional success is shown as a battle between the core values of truth and lies, and between honesty and deception. But the most glaring narrative lapse lies in the moral compass the film believes it upholds. In an already confused moral world, the “path to truth and success” that the protagonist follows here involves sharing a percentage with the minister in question to secure government contracts. And only then does he find success. Are the film’s authors here bowing to the corrupt machine of state administration?
This brutal act, which goes against the story’s ideals of truth, hard work, and honesty, is done so that the hero can prevail over the antagonist. Thus, error is met with injustice in order to overcome another error. Actor Suneet Bora plays the antagonist, and unfortunately, his role is more like a caricature of some 90s villain than someone powerful or threatening. The villain is also done to death to the point that it deducts some impression points from the movie.
Apart from these ambiguities, there are two special songs in the film featuring both the love interests of the protagonist, which were shot in Rajasthan and Goa. Although the songs are easy to forget, they give the audience a refreshing outlook in contrast to the dull images of the film. Singer-actor Zubin Garg comes in for a great performance in one of the songs, but he doesn’t contribute much to elevate the film.
So, in conclusion, “Jodha – Warrior of Life” suffers not from a lack of ambition, but from an absence of clarity – of thought, purpose, and execution. It draws from a familiar well of literary tropes, such as rich versus poor, betrayal in love, and overcoming in life, but it reproduces them without any sustained creativity or innovation. “Joddha – The Warrior of Life” fell down due to outdated storytelling, hackneyed plot points, a weak villain, and a forced climax that had no impact at all.
While the posters and trailers suggest that ‘Joddha – The Warrior of Life’ is an action-packed entertainer, the film fails to meet even the lowest of those expectations. It is neither an action film nor an entertaining film by any means. In the entire film, there is only one good action scene, and that too only comes as the climax approaches.
‘Joddha – The Warrior of Life’ is directed by Bhaskar Jyoti Goswami and produced by Parimal Biswas and Reema Biswas. Released on August 22, 2025, along with Hemjyoti Talukdar’s History, the film struggled to survive more than a week in theaters in Assam.
