Towards the very end of the movie, Sikandar, Salman Khan’s character, says “I don’t care” twice during an emotional scene. I felt that he was breaking the fourth wall and speaking to all those people who still think he will deliver. Looking at the quality of most of the recent Salman Khan movies, including the ones in the successful YRF spy universe, one might feel that Salman Khan was challenged by someone that his movies ran because they had good stories, and it hurt his ego and he is on a spree to prove that he can sell garbage stories just using his name. Sikandar is like a scaled-up advertisement of Salman Khan’s philanthropy, and unfortunately, the logical coherency of this advertisement is similar to those pan masala ads.
So our hero is Sajay Rajkot. He is the King of Rajkot, and as you can imagine, if Salman Khan becomes a King, it will be the perfect world we all would have imagined. Rajkot is a great place under the King’s surveillance as he conducts weddings, provides jobs, and whatnot. Unfortunately, at one point, a tragedy happened in his life, and that incident made him realize certain mistakes he had made. So, in order to rectify that, he decides to go to Mumbai, and what happens after he reaches Mumbai is what we see in Sikandar.
SPOILER ALERT! In order to review the film, one key aspect of the story, which many people sort of decoded while watching the trailer, has to be revealed. So, if you are excited about this movie, kindly refrain from the rest of the review. So, at one point in the story, SaiSri, the wife of Sanjay Rajkot, dies, and the movie is basically him trying to say sorry to his late wife for his unavailability by making sure the well-being of the people who got organs from his wife. So at around the 40th minute of the movie, when Salman Khan is crying on screen and saying I couldn’t take care of her, I was like, “What was this guy doing?” I mean, the movie has a scene where we are shown that he has not read a single WhatsApp message from his loving wife, with whom he has no issues.
Till this point, I was kind of hoping that all these atrocities were the compromises AR Murugadoss had to make as the film had the burden of satisfying Salman Khan fans. But once the movie shifts to Mumbai, it loses all the possibility of being an AR Murugadoss film, and everything you see is the worshipping of Salman Khan in the lamest way possible. If somebody needs 1000 Rs, Bhai will give 1 lakh. If somebody needs food and clothes? Bhai will buy the mall. If somebody has a fever, Bhai will build a hospital. The ridiculousness of the hero-worshipping was so bad that some might think that he has plans to run for elections, and thankfully, in the final moments, Bhai himself clarifies that, even though he can become an MLA or MP, he has no plans for that as it is not his field.
I have been doing movie reviewing for almost 13 years now, and when it comes to bad movies, the experience is such that you would find it difficult to sit through, and it will be that face-palm situation. However, only a few films have managed to surpass that face-palm scenario and make me and the audience laugh at certain heroic or sentimental scenes. Sikandar has a space in that hall of shame of movies. There is a very sentimental scene in the second half of the film, where the patriarch of a South Indian family living in Mumbai is given a class on gender equality by Sanjay Rajkot, aka Salman Khan. The staging was so bad that even the empowered women might find the scene extremely funny.
The movie feels like an AR Murugadoss film only when you look at the bullet point aspirations of the script. At one point, our hero is fighting against a corporate giant who is trying to acquire a slum by making breathing difficult for them. But since it is Salman Khan, there is no conflict. One fight, one bomb, problem solved. One of the individuals who received the heart from Sanjay’s wife was in a toxic relationship, and when Sanjay asks her father what happened to her heart, the father literally says her ex-boyfriend broke her heart. And the scene where Sanjay Rajkot convinces her not to go after that Kabir Singh character was so bizarre that Sandeep Reddy Vanga might giggle seeing the counter-reaction to his alpha male movies.
As always, Salman Khan is playing himself under a different name. His dialogue delivery style with slow speed and odd pauses is making punch dialogues too soft. I don’t know whether it is his stiff body language the scenes where he cries are somewhat unintentionally funny. Rashmika Mandanna is playing the role of a wife who is protecting her husband. Her Hindi accent was flawed, and I really don’t understand the logic of dubbing her for that weird song portion with some foreigner whose mother tongue is clearly not Hindi. Sathyaraj is reduced to a comical villain, and so was the case with Prateik Babbar, who played the role of his spoilt brat son. Sharman Joshi is playing this manager kind of role of the hero, and the dialogue delivery lacked confidence. Kajal Aggarwal, Jatin Sarna, Kishore, and several other names are there in the elaborate cast with nothing much to do.
The visuals have that production quality one would associate with a Bollywood film. But the story part here is so terrible that you won’t really bother about how technically solid the execution was. The songs felt pretty generic, and the only musical piece that stayed with me was the theme score “No Thrones Left,” composed by Santhosh Narayanan. If you want to laugh out loud inside the theater during this eid, grab your friends and go for this movie. If you go alone, there is a possibility that you might become friends with the guy sitting next to you. Just another thankless service to society from Salman Bhai.
Sikandar is like a scaled-up advertisement of Salman Khan's philanthropy, and unfortunately, the logical coherency of this advertisement is similar to those pan masala ads.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
