Title: Sikandar
Cast: Salman Khan, Rashmika Mandanna, Kajal Aggarwal
Director: AR Murugadoss
Where to watch: In Theatres
Ratings: 2 stars
Sikandar Review: Salman Khan’s last few films have failed to connect with the audiences, and even his fans were a bit disappointed with what the actor was doing. So, when it was announced that he is teaming up with AR Murugadoss (the filmmaker who gave Bollywood’s first 100 crore film with Ghajini), everyone was quite excited for Sikandar. It is an Eid release, and fans of Salman Khan will get to see him on the big screens on the festival after a gap of two years. But, was the film worth the wait? Read on to know that…
The movie revolves around Sanjay Rajkot aka Sikandar (Salman Khan). He is the Raja of Rajkot in Gujarat, and stays in a huge palace with his wife Saisri Rajkot (Rashmika Mandanna). Raja Saab has the heart of gold and does a lot of good things for the people of his city. One day, during a flight, when a Mumbai-based politician’s son misbehaves with a woman, Raja Saab does some action and beats up the bad guys. Now, the politician wants to take the badla of what happened with his son. Meanwhile, due to an incident, Saisri dies, and her organs are donated to three people in Mumbai. Now, Sikandar aka Sanjay aka Raja Saab decides to protect these three people from the bad guys. How he does that and what all he does for these three people forms the rest of the story…
The basic concept of Sikandar is quite good, ‘a guy protecting people who have the organs of his dead wife’. But what goes wrong here is the screenplay and direction. The first half of the film is decent. But the second half, which should have the movie’s highlight, is messed up.
After the interval, the screenplay is scattered. Scenes start and end without logic or continuity. It looks like different scenes were written, shot, and edited without proper flow. Murugadoss’ narration looks outdated. Sometimes, you will feel like you have watched a similar scene in a film earlier.
Apart from the first fight sequence in the flight, none of the action scenes have the thrilling factor to keep us on the edge of our seats. Today, when filmmakers are experimenting so much with action, Sikandar has scenes where a big hammer is given to the hero and he starts fighting with it.
In a massy movie, especially, featuring Salman Khan, we expect some whistle-worthy dialogues. But, in Sikandar, there’s not even one single dialogue that you will remember. Even the cinematography by Tirru is strictly average. The camera work could have created a huge impact in action scenes, but that is also very stagnant.
The makers promoted Sikandar as a massy film with a strong husband-wife romantic story. However, the romantic-emotional part fails to connect with us because we don’t know Sanjay and Saisri’s backstory. There’s just one dialogue that suggests they got married because of a problem in Saisri’s life. But what was the problem? Why did a man who was not interested in getting married get married? All these questions are left unanswered.
Sikandar Review – Actors’ Performances
Salman Khan is good and shows off his Bhai swag wonderfully. But, to be honest, the film doesn’t give him a chance to do something different. It is a kind of a role we have seen him doing earlier. Rashmika Mandanna has an extended cameo, and she looks beautiful in the movie. The actress has some strong scenes to perform, however, she needs to work on her Hindi dialogue delivery. As soon as she mouths a dialogue, the whole effect of an important scene goes away.
Also, the chemistry between Salman and Rashmika is very dull (maybe due to the age gap in real life). It doesn’t impress us much. For a movie with a romantic angle as a core part of the story, the chemistry between the leads should have been one of the highlights, but that doesn’t happen here.
This movie is a perfect example of how to waste the talented supporting cast. From Kajal Aggarwal to Sharman Joshi to Anjini Dhawan to Sathyaraj, everyone is wasted; and even if they have been given one or two scenes to perform, shockingly, all of them are bad.
Sikandar Review – Music
While the action isn’t great and the camera angle could have been better, one thing that works in favour of Sikandar is the background score given by Santhosh Narayanan. It is Narayanan’s music that makes the action sequences watchable.
Pritam’s music for the songs is decent. Zohra Jabeen and Sikandar Naache do grab our attention.
Sikandar Review – Final Verdict
Overall, Sikandar disappoints! Even with such an interesting concept and amazing cast, AR Murugadoss fails to deliver a good film. His outdated narration and scattered screenplay are the actual villains of this Salman Khan starrer.
