When a filmmaker becomes too infatuated with a star, the film, itself, becomes little more than an empty vessel, produced solely for the star’s presence. AR Murugadoss’ Sikandar, starring Salman Khan, is a glaring example of this phenomenon at its most uninspired.
Sanjay Rajkot (Salman Khan) is not merely a businessman; he is also a figure of near-mythic reverence in his hometown of Rajkot, Gujarat. Known to the people as Sikandar, he commands unwavering loyalty, his influence towering over the region like a benevolent messiah. He has a caring and doting wife, Saisri (Rashmika Mandanna), who cares for his safety. While traveling in business class on a flight, he saves a woman from being molested by a spoiled minister’s son, Arjun (Prateik Babbar). Incensed by his son’s humiliation, Minister Rakesh Pradhan (Sathyaraj), who resides in Mumbai, dispatches his enforcer, Inspector Prakash (Kishore), to bring Sanjay to his knees. But the people’s loyalty protects Sanjay, leaving the police force, led by Prakash, powerless. However, fate, or rather, the script’s insistence on forced escalation, forces Sanjay to Mumbai, where his clash with Pradhan intensifies, drawing in individuals from different walks of life. What follows is a predictable battle of power and vengeance, culminating in an operatic conflict that strains both plausibility and patience.
Laden with bombastic action, hollow dramatics, and a narrative that barely holds together, Sikandar is less a film than a bloated exercise in self-indulgence. It wastes no time in introducing its hero. Within the first five minutes, Sanjay is mid-air, engaged in a fistfight. There’s no buildup, no sense of escalation, just an abrupt descent into excess that sets the tone for the next two and a half hours. The film operates on the assumption that Khan’s screen presence alone can sustain engagement, sidestepping coherence, originality, and even the most basic dramatic stakes. Among its many missteps, one of the most glaring is its failure to establish any emotional weight in Sanjay’s relationship with his wife, Saisri. In one scene, she excitedly finishes a painting, eager to show it to her husband, only for Sanjay to dismiss her outright. When a caretaker asks if this upsets her, she launches into a reverential monologue about what a great man he is. Scene after scene unfolds in this fashion as at every turn, Sikandar reduces its protagonist to a God-like caricature and its audience to passive spectators of recycled bombast.
Performance-wise, Sikandar is entirely built around Salman Khan. He adds nothing to the film as he moves through the film with the same tired mannerisms, offering little beyond self-parody. The supporting cast is similarly wasted. Sharman Joshi is relegated to blind devotion, Prateik Babbar overacts at every turn, Sathyaraj is reduced to a cartoonish villain while Kishore delivers a performance so flat it barely registers. As for the female cast—Rashmika Mandanna, Kajal Aggarwal, and Anjini Dhawan—they serve no purpose beyond shedding tears, delivering lines of adulation, and occasionally breaking into song.
Technically, Sikandar operates only to glorify Salman Khan, even in moments meant to suggest vulnerability. S Tirru’s cinematography frames him in a perpetual halo of heroism, reducing every scene to an exercise in deification rather than visual storytelling. The editing by Vivek Harshan is so erratic that it’s difficult to determine whether the blame lies in his inability to establish a rhythm or the inherent flaws in the filming. Even the action sequences – typically the saving grace of such star vehicles – fail to generate any real pulse. They exist merely as obligatory set pieces, much like the film’s random song-and-dance numbers. Pritam’s soundtrack only reinforces the sense that every element here is a filler, strung together in service of so-called spectacle.
Since 2024, the practice of re-releasing older Hindi films has become a stopgap measure to keep theaters running amid dwindling new releases. Sikandar only reinforces why such a trend will continue. It doesn’t merely disappoint, it exemplifies the creative stagnation of an industry. In the end, it is more a bloated relic of a bygone era and little else.
Hindi, Action, Drama, Color