Sikandar Ka Muqaddar Review | A Flat Thriller With Unappealing Melodramatic Distractions

In his latest film, Sikandar Ka Muqaddar, Neeraj Pandey is trying to reinvent his own brand of movies that always feature these heists or operations along with a cat-and-mouse game between the one who did it and an investigator. But the problem is that the mixture of thrill, melodrama, and romance is very uneven, and with less emphasis given to the staging of sequences and the visual craft, Sikandar Ka Muqaddar feels like an extremely dated movie that is sort of oblivious to the film knowledge of its audience.

So, the movie shuttles between the present day and 15 years before that. Sikandar was an IT guy who helped businesses in setting up computers and all. He was arrested by Officer Jaswinder Singh from a diamond exhibition venue, from where diamonds worth around 50-60 crores got robbed. Along with Sikandar, Jaswindher also arrested Kamini Singh and Mangesh Desai because Singh’s instinct made him believe that these three were involved in the heist in some way. The officer’s efforts to find the costly diamonds and how the case affects everyone involved is what we see in Sikandar Ka Muqaddar.

Of late, when you see Neeraj Pandey films, the pacing feels more like an effort to cover up creative laziness rather than showing us something really exciting. In the case of Sikandar Ka Muqaddar also, one can see Pandey ramping up the speed just to make it seem like something exciting is happening. But the beats of this thriller are extremely guessable, and the inclusion of melodramatic bits, cheesy romance, and the dialogue bazi between the two characters makes it less exciting and more of a filmy template. When Pandey tries to place these fake end credits and goes back to reveal the twists, it almost feels like he thinks the audience is too naive not to see that coming.

Jimmy Sherigill, as Jaswinder Singh, is in his element and cracks the transition and persistence of the character in a very convincing manner. While other cast members struggled to present the dated dialogues neatly on screen, Jimmy knew the optimum level of drama needed in voice modulation to crack those lines. Avinash Tiwary, who is collaborating with Neeraj Pandey for the second time after the Netflix series Khakee, is actually struggling to carry the tone shifts in the character. The emotional sequence towards the end, after he met his ex-girlfriend, demanded him to portray a mix of emotions, and the performance looked really odd. Tamannah Bhatia, as Kamini Singh, doesn’t have any heavy tasks in her hands with this role, as the purpose of that character was pretty conventional.

Neeraj Pandey opens the movie with this lengthy single shot, and the film quickly moves into the central event. While the agility of the whole sequence makes it interesting on screen, once Jaswinder Singh is convinced that the three are linked to the heist, the writing starts to run out of ideas. Neeraj Pandey tries to maneuver the movie into the personal stories of these characters. At one point, I was even considering the possibility of him making the whole thing a character psyche study about what could happen between an obsessed officer and an innocent accused over a span of fifteen years. But to my disappointment, Neeraj Pandey chooses the most obvious twist that would come to the mind of anyone to take the story forward, and the unimaginative backstories you hear in that phase turn the movie into a slog.

On a one-liner level, the idea of exploring a relationship between a police officer and an accused looks very exciting. But rather than analyzing it as a story of resilience, Neeraj Pandey is trying to make it a very typical movie that will have the same twist one would expect it to have 15-20 minutes into the movie. The narrative’s agility, bad visual effects, flatly lit visuals, etc., give the film the same visual texture of something like a Special 26. But beyond that, the movie rarely manages to find a moment that would give us that excitement of seeing a heist thriller.