The press screening of Ikka was held at Mumbai's Sunny Super Sound—an appropriate venue, I thought, given the super sounds Sunny Deol makes in the movie. Since Damini (1993), the actor has used the courtroom drama as his personal soapbox. He rages and he raves, he rebukes and he reprimands. A part of me wishes Deol were an actual lawyer working in real courthouses. Imagine the swiftness in proceedings once his gavel-like fists land on the furniture—like a thunderclap.
To be fair, director Siddharth P Malhotra uses this trick judiciously, initially giving us a calm, urbane Deol in natty linenwear. The actor plays Arjun Mehra, a celebrity defence attorney who never loses, always has a decisive ace up his sleeve (hence the film's title), and, despite his large apartment and luxe lifestyle, exclusively represents the innocent and the powerless. And here comes his latest innocent: Shaurya (Akshaye Khanna), the reprobate son of an industrialist, accused of sexually assaulting and attempting to murder a date.
I won't spoil how, and under what conditions, Arjun comes to defend Shaurya. Suffice it to say they share some uncomfortable history (another clue: think Dia Mirza and one of her most famous films). Rakish and unlikable though he is, Shaurya's reappearance in Arjun's life seals the film into a neat, old-school conundrum: will you abandon your values for something equally precious to your heart?
Ikka is written by Althea Kaushal and Mayank Tiwari, from a story by Kaushal. The writers make two smart choices early on. Firstly, for a long while, we cannot tell for certain if Shaurya did or did not commit a crime. The blurred facts of the case emerge piecemeal. Secondly, the film is actually a three-hander, with small-time public prosecutor Madhura (Tillotoma Shome) going up against a seasoned but unsure Arjun. The scales, in short, are evenly weighted at any point. The film becomes a staring match between the characters as Madhura stumbles through a ‘watertight’ case, Arjun second-guesses his convictions, and a Gnomic Shaurya keeps them both on their toes.
Malhotra's feature films—such as Hichki (2018) and the more recent Maharaj (2024)—typically have fine actors and a promising central hook. The courtroom match-up of Tillotoma Shome and Sunny Deol—between indie grit and big-screen bluster—is an inspired gamble on paper. I've always savoured the tenacity and tiny comic flourishes Shome brings to a "mainstream" performance (watch her sipping coconuts while on mission as a heavily pregnant spy in The Night Manager). Deol, pace himself, is capable of depth and heart, especially in ordinarily staged scenes where he must simply sit and talk. But Malhotra can't find the dramatic centre of his film. The second half ties itself into knots, resolved with a flurry of ex machina reveals and reversals. The film is constantly lurching toward a gotcha moment, and the 'ace', when Arjun finally plays it, is more like a nine of clubs.
Not all is lost, though. There is a time-travelling quality to Tiwari's dialogue that I found oddly charming. This is a film where 'haploidentical' co-exists with "Ameer baap ki bigdi aulad”. Meanwhile, a reference to Deol's 'dhai kilo ka haath' is perfectly admissible fan service. At first, I found it a touch absurd that Arjun would refuse to look at critical evidence, declining to cast aspersions on the victim’s character. Yet this is the kind of moral sheepishness that Indian leading men, on screen, used to live by.
There is always a danger, at any actor's peak, of sliding swiftly into formula. What happened with Drishyam 2 and Dhurandhar was a culmination of ten years of Akshaye Khanna. The actor on a bad day can enliven a funeral, and goes obligingly heavy on the face acting—and yet, for all his proprietary squinting and scowling, I found myself less than amused this time. Some things just did not add up. For instance, why does Shaurya, making an entry into the courtroom, merit a hero's walk, complete with musical fanfare? Why does he grind out his words where speaking plainly would suffice? Even hamminess requires a salt of logic. "Your Honour, the accused is overstating," Shome says of Khanna at one point. Your Honour, he is also overacting.
For years now, the Hindi courtroom drama has been in a bad way, especially when other language industries do wonderful things with it. Ikka barely moves the needle in this regard. Malhotra has apparently shopped this script around for a decade. The film he has made of it is competent but unremarkable—not an embarrassment to its genre but not a leading light either. Like a lot of recent Bollywood, it's a work of wholly wholesome ordinariness.