Ikka Review:
Nothing good happens to Akshaye Khanna in an SUV. In Dhurandhar (2025), he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt inside the car and now, in Siddharth P Malhotra’s courtroom-drama Ikka, a girl’s bloodied body falls off his vehicle’s shotgun seat in the dead of the night. Akshaye’s Shauryaman Gaur is the perfect villain. He is a politician’s brat whose smugness alone seems to be substantial evidence for the crime. But did he actually do it? Or was it just a slip that metastasized into a sin?
Cast: Sunny Deol, Akshaye Khanna, Tillotama Shome and Dia Mirza
Directed by: Siddarth P. Malhotra
Written by: Althea Kaushal and Mayank Tewari
Streaming on: Netflix
Rating: 2.5 stars
Enter Sunny Deol as Arjun Mehra, a principled, hotshot lawyer compelled to represent Shauryaman whose guts he despises. Arjun’s daughter is suffering from leukemia and only his biological father Shauryaman’s stem cells can save her. It’s an interesting moral dilemma which makes for delicious drama. An idealist has to bend the rules to protect the possibly guilty. Akshaye also doesn’t make things easy for Sunny and often ticks off the latter’s seething rage with a mischievous, quivering smile.
Ikka stacks the deck well. The case itself has a pulpy premise. Shauryaman, a habitual womaniser, picked up a girl Soma (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor) at a nightclub. Later, they tried to get cozy in a car and ultimately an eye-witness sees her being thrown out of the vehicle, with a gash on her neck. Shauryaman seems like a clear convict but soon Sunny’s Arjun employs his legal manoeuvrings to poke holes in the prosecution’s case. Arjun is locking horns with Madhura Banerjee (Tillotama Shome), an underdog, junior lawyer who is a bundle of nerves fighting for justice.
Tillotama is always an assured performer but here she seems to have gotten the short end of the stick. The drama is skewed towards the men, Sunny and Akshaye, whose Batman-Joker like dynamic makes for a fun watch (Sunny even pounds his fist on a table and even whacks the latter on the face similar to how things play out in the iconic interrogation scene from The Dark Knight (2008)). The Rehman Dakait hangover is heavy here as Akshaye puts on his signature scowl and walks with an indifferent slouch. But the film is only enjoyable when the men are in the ring.
The courtroom scenes are plainly written and the investigation doesn’t really offer many unexpected turns. As a mystery, Ikka doesn’t play with the pack on the table and keeps introducing wildcards. A twist is not the one small detail you missed but a last-minute witness or a not-yet-revealed piece of information from a character’s past. It’s less smart, more patchwork writing. Arjun’s daughter seems to exist only to be a negotiating device between him and Shauryaman and it’s getting tiring to see a working woman being introduced as somebody dexterously handling both home and professional duties (In this one, Tillotama buys vegetables in a homemaker nighty before she gets on an important work call).
Sunny too seems to be limited by the Hindi film hero’s pristineness. As a lawyer, that too one who does business from a glass building, Arjun has the morals of a public prosecutor. Everytime he pulls off a shady move, a melodramatic guilt takes over him. He is even referred to as “Ram” in a scene. The sanctity gets nauseating at times. Akshaye’s Shauryaman, on the other hand, starts off as delectably devious but quite soon the actor stops playing the character and starts performing for an audience (He raises his handcuffed hands in victory. Quite a Rehman Dakait move).
Ikka can’t seem to go beyond being a casting coup. It has all these performers but rather than giving them something new to play with, it suffices itself with their established screen personalities. With Sunny in black overalls, inevitably a Damini (1993) reference will seep in (Tillotama gets an unexplained arm cast only to put in the words “dhai kilo ka haath”). Ikka constantly wants to project itself as something smarter than it is. It’s that guy at a houseparty who thinks knowing more than one way to shuffle a deck is a real talent.
