Salman Khan’s much-anticipated Eidi for his loyal fans this year comes in the guise of AR Murugadoss-directed Sikandar in theatres. The film also stars Rashmika Mandanna with Sathyaraj, Sharman Joshi, Kajal Aggarwal, Prateik Babbar, Kishore, and Jatin Sarna in what can best be described as extended cameos. Does it deserve your time in theatres? Read on to find out.
PS: Spoilers ahead!
Story:
The present king of Rajkot – Sanjay (Salman Khan), fondly called Sikandar by some, and Raja Saab by others, is a benevolent modern-day ruler who loves his praja (people in his kingdom – here meaning people of Rajkot). He lives with his wife Saishri (Rashmika Mandanna) in his palatial home, does good deeds, lots of charity, stands up for the downtrodden, has 49 cases pending against him but not a single FIR because he may not be an ardent fan of doing the right things by the law but the bottom line is – he can do no wrong. His subjects treat him like a messiah, and he’s so busy being a saviour to his praja that he has little time to spare for his wife, who, for some reason, is determined to protect her husband from all evil and danger by herself, without communicating with him at all.
Anyway, when Arjun (Prateik Babbar), son of a Mumbai politician Pradhan (Sathyaraj), attempts to outrage the modesty of a woman mid-air on a flight, Sanjay intervenes and brings him down on his knees. However, this episode makes him the sworn enemy of Pradhan, who appoints his trusted cop (Kishore) in Rajkot to avenge his son’s humiliation. One thing leads to another, and Sanjay loses his wife, who had registered for organ donation. Consumed by guilt and probably emptiness, Sanjay makes it his sole mission to track down the organ recipients, protect them, and help improve their lives. This mission brings him, along with his band of background bouncers, to the city of Mumbai, where Minister Pradhan is waiting to wage a war against the people Sanjay wants to protect. Will the good Samaritan Sanjay manage to win in his mission against all odds? That’s what the film seems to be about.
Review:
We happily left our brains at home when we stepped out to watch Salman Khan’s latest Eid offering for this year. We know it’s a festival release; rather, there’s bound to be a festival since it’s the release of a Salman Bhai film! Yes? Sadly, not any more. We can’t blame anyone but ourselves for subjecting our senses to the assault that they witnessed in this snoozefest of a film that ends up being an insult to the loyal fans and the superstardom of the man, the myth, the legend – Salman Khan. Trust us when we say that it was excruciatingly painful for us to try to comprehend what the plot of the film is, for the purpose of jotting it down above in this review. It’s not because we were looking for some logic. Nope (we already mentioned that we’d left our brains behind, remember?). It’s solely because we have been trying to make some sense of what we witnessed on the silver screens in the 150-minute long runtime of this AR Murugadoss directorial.
Also Read | The piercing prowess of Tabu: Contemporary India’s ‘thinking actress’
By this time, it is an established fact that Bhai fans don’t go to the theatres to watch a film starring Salman Khan. They go to the theatres to watch Salman Khan. Fair enough! But what’s the point in going to the theatres to watch their favourite star if the star in question, who at least would put in the bare minimum effort till his 2019 release Bharat, now seems to be doing an ehsaan (favour) on his fans by just appearing in a film, sleepwalking through his role, putting in zero effort in his scenes? Heck, he barely even makes eye contact with his leading lady in the film (more on that later) – that is what we’re talking about when we say ‘zero effort’. There was a time when Salman was known for delivering in massy action films (read Wanted, Dabangg, Ek Tha Tiger, etc), but in Sikandar, he seems too tired, apathetic, and complacent to deliver in the action set pieces as well. There’s his signature swag, no doubt, but his response time in the reaction shots is so delayed that it looks effortless for all the wrong reasons. The director relies on a plethora of slow-motion shots where Salman can be seen, which can best be described as posing for the camera, rather than beating up the baddies.
Sikandar is an extension of superstar Salman Khan, who portrays the character to the extent that one can hardly differentiate the actor from the character (and that isn’t good in this case). One fails to comprehend exactly where Salman has left himself and from which point he has become Sikandar (the character). At this point, he’s not even playing a version of himself. There are several scenes where it seems that Salman just appeared on the sets of the film after wrapping up one of the Weekend Ka Vaar episodes in Bigg Boss, and was too exhausted to even go for a costume change. His neatly tailored suits and multiple slow-motion shots of him walking or standing with both hands in his pockets (a Salman Khan signature stance) do little to make you believe otherwise. Even if you willingly suspend all disbelief, then you have the actor giving lessons on morality, and defining what an “Alpha male” actually is, much like he does while schooling the participants who exemplify toxic masculinity in Bigg Boss.
Co-written by Murugadoss, along with Rajat Arora, Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal, the film, much like its trailer, lacks coherence. It just doesn’t make sense. There are at least three subplots in the film, along with social messaging (because, why not?) against the backdrop of the ongoing feud between Sanjay aka Sikandar aka Raja Saab, and Minister Pradhan. There are also some bits of romance, responsibility, and revenge thrown in the mix along with a hark back to the incident of Sanjay Dutt’s infamous alleged involvement in Mumbai blasts just because Salman’s character is named after Sunil and Nargis Dutt’s son. With so many elements being part of a script, one would at least expect them to be joined together coherently in the thread of the screenplay, even if it is devoid of logic. That very thread goes missing in Sikandar, which is quite astonishing considering the film has four writing credits. We haven’t been able to get over the fact that four writers were working on the film, and all that the makers could do was throw at us romance that is cringeworthy at best, songs that are mediocre at best, action sequences that are tepid at best, and dialogues that are pedestrian at best. To top it all, the superstar protagonist portrays his indifference at best throughout the runtime of this film.
We watched the film with a lot of Bhai fans in the theatres. So naturally, Salman’s first entry in the airplane gets hoots, whistles, and cheers from fans (yours truly included). But that was probably the reaction on seeing Bhai on the big screen in tight close-ups with flying fists and kicks – Salman doing Salman things after about two years. It was all a steady downhill from there. Early on in the film there’s a scene where Sanjay is narrating the reasons behind his different monikers (Sanjay, Sikandar, and Raja Saab) to Saishri while she’s least bothered to pay attention as her mind is occupied in texting on her phone – asking for backup, to prep for a potential attack on him. We had no idea how ironic this scene would be as by the time the film reaches its interval point, all we could see in the theatre was Bhai fans busy on their respective phones (probably crying for help to save themselves from the attack on their senses from all corners), rather than watching their favourite star on a screen that is right in front of their eyes. The scene is probably the best example of foreshadowing in recent times. There’s another one where Sikandar, after he loses his wife, ends up singing, “Ajeeb daastan hai yeh, kahaan shuru kahaan khatam. Yeh manzilein hain kaun si, na woh samajh sake na ham,”– echoing our exact thoughts about the film. This is supposed to come from a grieving husband, but it is so unintentionally funny that it makes you wonder if this was just Salman thinking out loud about what he’s doing in the film.
There are times when even a mediocre script is saved by the acting performances in a movie or show. In Sikandar, there’s practically not even a semblance of a script to save! As far as acting performances go, if Salman is doing an ehsaan on his fans and his director by showing up on the sets, delivering his lines with the least interest, the other actors who make up the supporting cast also do little to save the film. Heck, we reiterate, there is nothing that can be saved in this film. The cast, much like the plot and screenplay, is all over the place. Rashmika Mandanna does make an effort to enunciate every syllable in Hindi, making her dialogue delivery somewhat intelligible, but has little to do that will make the audience take a note of her acting prowess, and that is more the fault of the makers who’ve handed her a role that exists only in service of the superstar who anchors the film. She’s still somewhat tolerable in her scenes, but like we mentioned in our thoughts about the film’s trailer, the moment she shares the frame with Salman, it becomes cringeworthy. We’re willing to let the age gap between them slide for a bit, but we cannot let the lack of chemistry slide. As a romantic pair, there’s zero spark between the two, as is going to be the case when she’s looking at him as a senior mentor, while he’s trying his best to avoid even maintaining eye contact with her.
It was an arduous task for us to witness a veteran actor like Sathyaraj hamming his way through the film. It doesn’t help that the writers seem to forget his existence on multiple occasions and make him appear and disappear as and when they remember that he’s also a part of the ensemble cast. Prateik Babbar as Arjun is as forgetful as his career in films. Kajal Aggarwal, Kishore, Jatin Sarna, and Sanjay Kapoor are there so that Salman can do more of Salman things on screen. None of their characters has any scope to deliver a worthy performance. Our heart goes out to Sharman Joshi, who otherwise a fine actor, is reduced to a sidekick in the background. It seems as if he’s been asked to deliberately deliver a substandard act so that Salman can come across slightly better. We wonder what happened to the Sharman Joshi of 3 Idiots, Life in a Metro, or even Golmaal.
Sikandar will also go down in history as not just among the worst films of Salman Khan, but also as one of the rare films in which every single department – casting, writing, editing, acting, music, cinematography, background score, production design, etc., has failed spectacularly. None of the compositions by Pritam leave any impression. Santhosh Narayanan’s blaring background score does little to uplift any of the multiple entries of Salman or any other scene for that matter. S Tirru’s cinematography lacks finesse, and Vivek Harshan’s editing probably does more harm to the screenplay than the writing itself.
Verdict:
As the end credits roll and the song Sikandar Naache plays on screen, you can see Salman doing some footwork in the choreography – that’s the most amount of effort that has been put into Sikandar by Salman. It’s a disservice and an insult to his fans to expect them to leave their sense of reasoning behind when watching the films of their favourite star. For the love of Salman, we’re even willing to do that, but not at the cost of an incoherent film that doesn’t even do justice to fan service and a star who’s probably too indifferent to make the bare minimum effort for his fans, let alone attempting to reinvent himself for their sake. At one point in the film, Sikandar says, “I’m man enough to accept that I was wrong…” which made us wonder, who from this movie’s team will be man enough to admit that they were wrong to make this disaster of a film?
We’d suggest you give Bajrangi Bhaijaan, or Ek Tha Tiger, another shot this Eid instead of being disappointed by Sikandar.
Sikandar
Watch in: Theatres
Director: AR Murugadoss
Writers: AR Murugadoss, Rajat Arora, Hussain Dalal, Abbas Dalal
Cast: Salman Khan, Rashmika Mandanna, Sathyaraj, Sharman Joshi, Kajal Aggarwal, Prateik Babbar, Jatin Sarna
Rating: 1 star
(All images, unless mentioned otherwise, via YouTube/Screengrab)
