Ikka Review Melodrama Wins Over Sunny Deols Dhai Kilo Ka Haath Akshaye Khannas Sneer

Ikka review: What does an honest, idealistic lawyer, successful enough to own a sea-facing flat in Mumbai, do when faced with the prospect of defending a man charged with the grievous assault of a young woman?

The face off between won’t-defend-the-indefensible Arjun Mehra (Sunny Deol) and entitled rich jerk Shauryaman Gaur (Akshaye Khanna) is your standard battle between the good guy vs the bad guy. Left to himself, Arjun wouldn’t touch Shaurya with a bargepole, but here, the writers try and finesse it, by forcing the former into the latter’s corner, by coming up with a you-can’t-be-serious crutch. But we are asked to roll with it, because it is that kind of film; truth being stranger than fiction, and all that.

As a righteous lawyer, fighting the good fight, Sunny Deol takes us back to his ‘dhai kilo ka haath’ in Damini. We haven’t forgotten it. Neither has the film, which tries to make it a meta reference by getting the dogged public prosecutor (Tillotama Shome) say it out loud — yes, actually — in a court room. He’s not just a champion of wronged women; this time around, he won’t hear any wrong about them.

The choice of Shome, as a near-central character — her ‘humble background’ reminding me of the Jyotika character in the recent legal drama ‘System’ — adjacent to two leading men who’ve done years of masala is an interesting one. She brings in astringency when the film threatens to turn too pulpy, but is also left distinctly out of place when forced into the kind of contrivances which Dia Mirza, as the supportive wife of Arjun, has no trouble pulling off.

The trouble with the film, which besets it every time we see sequences which belong more to the old-style mainstream movies of yore, is that it cannot check its bent towards melodrama. There are teary mothers galore, one (Jyoti Mukerji) accusing a lawyer of being unfair to her comatose daughter, another reassuring her husband that he is doing the right thing for their dangerously ill daughter. And a miserable wife (Sanjeeda Sheikh) to boot, who doesn’t quite know what to do with her spouse.

And then, of course, there’s Akshaye Khanna, basking in his successful post-Dhurandhar phase, dropping his perennial sneer for a few moments to deliver some straight lines. His is possibly the most intriguing part: he never dials back from his position, insisting that he may be terrible, but is not a killer. And uses that dialogue to sow the right degree of doubt in our minds: did he, didn’t he?

We swallow some of the convenient bits — like I said, it’s the kind of film which demands we suspend disbelief — till we come to that place where the film jumps into explaining every single twist. Why can’t we deal with ambiguity? Why not let us sit with the idea that humans can be complex, and do wrong even if the reasons are right?

Silly me. Unless there are dialogues, and situations, underlining the skills of our good lawyer, how will Arjun justify being called Ikka? How indeed.

Ikka cast: Sunny Deol, Akshaye Khanna, Dia Mirza, Tillotama Shome, Sanjeeda Sheikh, Shishir Sharma, Jyoti Mukerji, Daria Bedi