Ikka, the new Netflix original movie featuring Sunny Deol and Akshaye Khanna, is the typical heightened courtroom drama that will make you raise your eyebrows at its twists and coincidences rather than leave you surprised. For an audience exposed to good content, the twists they have hidden from us won’t feel like a surprise, since we may anticipate that twist as one of the possibilities for the story to move forward. With the dialoguebaazi taking over rational debate at many points, Ikka is a messy mix of heroics and legal thrills.
Arjun Mehra is a prominent lawyer with a great track record. A case of a woman being assaulted and thrown out of a car was registered, and a businessman named Shauryaman Gaur was arrested. Mr. Gaur’s father, being a politician, asks Arjun to appear for Shauryaman. Despite not being interested in the case, certain personal situations force Arjun Mehra to take up this case. How Arjun Mehra fights this case with a conflicted mind is what we see in Ikka.
So if you are wondering about the name Ikka, it’s because Arjun is called Ikka (Ace of cards) in the lawyer circle. There is a formulaic structure to this movie that made me wonder whether this was initially designed for a theatrical release. To show Arjun as a top lawyer, we have his introduction scene as a TED Talk kind of thing. Then the story sort of goes to the situation that forces Arjun to take up this case. The idea is impressive, but the way they made that happen in a really, really short span of time felt like a coincidence that can only happen in movies. When it comes to the courtroom procedures, we have the typical court formula of the junior fumbling initially and then learning stuff out of frustration and determination. And one more thing, Dharmendra’s son Sunny Deol is the hero. So the bad guy will get the punishment is a sure thing from the word go.
Siddharth P Malhotra, who previously made movies like We Are Family, Hitchki, etc., is unable to take this movie away from the traps of modern-day writing. The dialogues are way too explanatory, and the drama is too excessive at times. When it comes to the writing, the structure of the story has several familiar beats. And in terms of the legal elements in the script, even with my limited Jolly LLB knowledge on how the court functions, I found the court in this movie way too filmy. The prosecution is bringing witness after witness, and the judge is allowing all of it. And this Arjun Mehra character is projected as a brilliant lawyer who would surprise his opposition. But whatever we see here as his masterstroke feels less surprising and more rhetorical. The confrontation between Shauryaman and Arjun’s wife felt like a pointless scene to give us a backstory that had no relevance in this context.
The filmmaking part of this movie can be considered formulaic or generic to an extent. But what is truly underwhelming and extremely disappointing is the performances of the two main men, Sunny Deol and Akshaye Khanna. Sunny Deol is visibly uncomfortable having to play some parts of this character in that subtle meter. And in many of the scenes with Akshaye Khanna, we can see him making Arjun Mehra a screaming character, something we associate with roles played by Sunny Deol. Coming to Akshaye Khanna, it almost felt like he was doing a bad mimicry of himself in front of the camera. In his efforts to make Shauryaman a remorseless character, he ended up overdoing his typical smirky attitude, which looked outright comical in many scenes, especially his first combination scene with Sunny Deol. Dia Mirza as Avantika Mehra gets to do that old-school mother character with a lot of dramatic lines, and she was convincing in that. Tillotama Shome is trapped in the underdog archetype, and the casting almost felt like an effort to give the movie an outlook of having great performers. Daria Bedi, who played the part of the hero’s daughter, had minimal dialogue. But at times, I felt she cracked the pitch, which the other performers in this movie should have maintained.
If Netflix is analysing the quality of the content based on how many people watched the full movie, I would say it can be a misleading metric. Because I watched the full movie with the hope that some logically convincing event would come up in the final phase that would add sense to some of the broad-stroke writing. A good way to understand the quality of the movie would be to look at the areas where people paused the movie for a while. Because I was forced to do that multiple times due to disappointing or predictable turns of events. Ikka belongs to that pool of Netflix movies that you can sit through without any takeaways.
