New Delhi:
An all-out assault on all things logical, Sikandar, written and directed by A.R. Murugadoss with the express purpose of giving Salman Khan’s do-gooder bhai persona a leg up, has the airs of an emperor who can do no wrong. But nothing that the film does is quite right. Its ambition far outstrips its output.
Like Murugadoss’ Ghajini, the 2008 blockbuster that hinged on Aamir Khan as a vengeful anterograde amnesiac who went by the same name as the protagonist of Sikandar, Sanjay, it revolves around the death of a woman in a violent incident. But it struggles to get its act together.
Ghajini was a revenge saga. Sikandar is a love story that is spun off into a confoundingly convoluted tale of a man determined to keep a memory alive in the face of the ire of a politician bent upon settling scores with the former.
The bloated actioner, which alternates between Rajkot and Mumbai, also aspires to be Salman Khan’s version of Jawan. It opens too many fronts for its own good and ends up fluffing its lines.
Little of what Sikandar cobbles together – the story and screenplay are both by the director – achieves any degree of coherence. It’s way too dependent on wild yet unimaginative contrivances that strain credulity.
Salman Khan is the last Maharaja of Rajkot but there is nothing remotely royal about the character or the interpretation of it. The swag, aimed at his fan base, is reminiscent of the truculent cops and aggressive altruists that the star has been on the screen over the years.
Sanjay Rajkot is a benevolent ruler, a Sikandar without an army because he does not need one. He has a bunch of flunkies, but when trouble erupts, he transforms into a one-man demolition squad.
He is a man who has donated large swathes of his land holdings to his loyal subjects. But regardless of all his noble deeds, he is always more a rough and ready muscleman than a solemn monarch immersed in statecraft.
Anybody who stands in his path faces the force of an unstoppable gale that leaves nothing standing. One man – a smarmy politician, Minister Pradhan (Sathyaraj), who has the Mumbai police at his beck and call, dares to go head-to-head against him. That battle is obviously reserved for the film’s finale. On its way there, Sikandar flounders big time as it looks for legs to stand on. The writing all over the place, it never finds solid ground.
Sanjay, who is both Raja and Sikandar to the people he lords over, takes on wrongdoers, including a compromised police officer (Kishore Kumar G.) and a phalanx of goons who pop out of nowhere only to be quickly and summarily reduced to pulp. Anybody who dares to stand in his path faces the force of a gale that leaves nobody standing.
The raja dotes on his much younger rani, Srisai (Rashmika Mandanna), but has little time for her because his commitment to his and subjects and his work – it is another matter that we do not see him doing anything of import – takes precedence over everything else.
These early portions of Sikandar are by far the film’s dullest as an ageing superstar labour to exude romantic fervour and his queen comes across a giggly college girl rather than the Rani Sahiba she is supposed to be. We are separated by age but not by our beliefs, she tells somebody.
Sanjay fancies himself as a reformer, a crusader, and a protector of the weak and the wronged. Srisai is a painter with a social conscience – she is a registered organ donor because she believes service to humanity has more power than devotion to the divine – but it is only once that the audience gets a glimpse of an artistic work of hers.
One part of Sikandar’s story focuses on his relationship with his wife (Rashmika Mandanna), which ends tragically. The turn of events leads him to scramble to rescue and save three people – slum boy Qamaruddin, aspiring entrepreneur Vaidehi (Kajal Agarwal) and jilted young woman Nisha (Anjini Dhawan) – whose lives get intertwined with his and Srisai’s destiny.
The irrepressible fighter takes his love for his wife beyond the boundaries of life and death. I am man enough to admit that I was wrong in not giving her the time that she deserved from me, he tells his friend and associate Amar (Sharman Joshi). This scene ties up with an earlier one in which Srisai tells somebody that her husband has given her everything except waqt.
Sanjay Rajkot’s atonement gives the man three clear social missions. One, he sets out to save a group of slumdwellers from losing their homes and lives to the noxious effects of a garbage dump created in their habitat by a greedy real estate middleman. Two, he doubles down to helping a married woman push back against her orthodox father-in-law. And three, he takes it upon himself to deliver comeuppance to a man who betrays a young woman in love with him.
The hero’s primary war is on the evil politician – he asserts that he is a real raja while his foe is only an erstwhile royal – and his goons. The animosity between Sanjay and Minister Pradhan goes to the film’s opening moments in which the hero pulverises the latter’s dissolute son Arjun (Prateik Babbar).
The bad guys come out of the woodwork periodically to fuel protracted action blocks that are shot and edited with a degree of energy and effervescence. But none of these has the power to salvage the film as a whole.
The confrontation between rock-steady righteousness and diabolical manipulation is meant to be seen as one man’s intrepid activism in the face of the acute apathy of the high and mighty. Yeh kalyug hai, says the villain. While the context seems clear, the substance is all underwhelmingly fuzzy.
The battle between two forms of power – one generous and public-minded, the other exploitative and self-serving – plays out on lines that are so predictable that they only serve to aggravate the drab familiarity of Sikandar.
Insaaf nahi saaf karna hai, Salman Khan’s character says before the fight to the finish gets underway. But Sikandar is anything but saaf and steady. Yes, there is something that the film does manage to wipe clean off its face: sense.
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