Review: In Salman Khan's 'Sikandar', Confused Storytelling Overwhelms Star Power
'Sikandar', starring Salman Khan and Rashmika Mandanna, hit theatres on 30 March.
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Sikandar (Salman Khan) aka Sanjay Rajkot aka Raja sahab is the king of Rajkot, the last of his name, who is a ‘king’ both by lineage and because of the adoration he gets from the people of Rajkot. He’s the quintessential hero with a golden heart – he gives away land to his ‘subjects’, builds schools and hospitals.
And since this is Salman Khan, he also beats up every goon that comes his way with a straight face and sometimes blazing eyes. The people of Rajkot aren’t the only ones capable of boasting their undying devotion for the raja, there’s also his much-younger wife Saisri Rajkot (Rashmika Mandanna).
Their marriage is an interesting parallel to the film itself – or what the film hopes it manages to pull off. Sanjay isn’t a great husband – he often neglects his wife for his work; while not downright malicious, it’s a marriage where she’s taken for granted. And yet, because of a few flashy displays of affection – a drone show, a song-and-dance sequence – she doesn’t complain. Instead, she secretly protects him from the shadows (that last part, I admit, is one of the most interesting aspects of her character). The sheen and the glamour of these over-the-top gestures are intended to hide the flaws in the marriage.
The makers’ intentions with the film seem similar – if they can patch up enough cracks with a well-placed Salman action sequence, perhaps the audience will miss the blunders. For a while, it works, barely. You’re able to keep your eyes on the spectacle of it all – after all, there is a tried-and-tested appeal to a Salman Khan, messiah of the people, action flick that doesn’t expect anything much from the audience.
Sometimes it’s nice to sit in a theatre, switch your brain off and just enjoy the pixels but this film just isn’t gripping enough for that, the flashy displays are simply not distracting enough. Even Khan and Mandanna, both crowd-pullers in their own might, simply don’t manage to recreate their previous appeal.
The makers seem to be relying heavily on the ‘Salman charm’ working and all the usual elements are there – the slo-mo shots of his punches, the iconic bracelet jingling down his wrist, the camera’s sheer reverence for the actor it’s focused on. But it just doesn’t seem to work.
A star isn’t built by charisma and screen presence alone, the script, the film, the sound have to do some of the work. In Sikander, they all seem to have taken a backseat, their feet up, relaxed, waiting for the actor’s star power to do their job. In the absence of a strong script, there is no actual character, no actual arc.
When Sanjay is dealing with a tragedy, his grief is reduced to some tear-shed and a drink. He promises to change as a man but neither his before nor his after are written well enough for either to have the desired effect.
And yet, all of this isn’t the film’s worst problem – you could perhaps, if you’re a diehard fan, still shake yourself off and try to enjoy it. The worst thing about the film is that it forgets its own arcs when it’s convenient – like there are two parallel films playing instead of two parallel arcs.
The film opens with a sequence that introduces the antagonists – a politician’s son lands up in Sanjay’s crosshairs. His father (an underutilised Sathyaraj) sets out to take revenge and brings in a corrupt cop (Kishore) to do his dirty work. And if a threat to his life isn’t enough, the story sets up multiple people around him who could be harmed, making him even more ‘vulnerable’.
Three organ transplant patients enter the foray – Sanjay must keep them safe at all cost because they’re ‘protecting’ parts of his late wife. The antagonists come and go from the plot – not nearly menacing enough for the audience to believe, even for a second, that they might actually cause any harm.
One also can’t help but wonder who took up the role his wife was playing in his protection and if that role is left empty, why doesn’t he have to work harder to stay safe?
Even when they manage to frame Sanjay as a terrorist, there’s no actual sense of danger. It’s Sanjay aka Sikandar, he’s going to be absolutely fine. If you’re counting, he was first facing an angry politician and his police stooge.
Then he becomes the savior in three lives – a young Qamaruddin whose slum is being rendered unlivable because of a real-estate middleman’s greed and disregard for the residents’ lives, there’s Vaidehi (Kajal Agarwal) who is married to a man who can’t seem to stand up to the family patriarchy who makes her ‘promise’ she won’t work as a condition to their wedding, and Nisha (Anjini Dhawan), the jilted lover who can’t seem to see the red flags waving right in front of her eyes.
At this point, we get why the film is keeping the bad guys waiting so Khan can get through the other scenes – the writers simply can’t find any other logical way to tie all these threads together. All of the aforementioned actors, and Sharman Joshi (who plays Sanjay’s sidekick), don’t get to actually showcase any of their skills. And the dialogues don’t do them any favours – while some one-liners work, others fall flat.
There are times when some of the set pieces work – some of the initial action sequences seem to be more creative than the ones that follow. At one point, Khan seems to open the door to ‘hell’ – it’s the kind of mindless fun you wished the film had more of. Some of the action sequences are supported well by Santhosh Narayanan’s background score but even that loses its merit after a while.
There are some hints of the pulpy excess and the massy appeal that you expect from a film like this but the undoing of Sikandar is that despite a few flashes of ingenuity, it doesn’t hold on to anything long enough to actually have an impact.