In 1973, a no-nonsense cop, a working-class insurgent, railed against the system, the socio-economic order, the larger disaffection of a society. Amitabh Bachchan, in the restless, rebellious force of his presence, gave form to this new cinematic archetype in Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer: the angry young man. In 2004, however, an angry old man was born. Bachchan was no longer young, nor the towering star he had once been. But he remained the unsparing cop, the same man of the working class, except now he understood that the system could not be remade; the only way to endure it was to push back against it, to protect the socioeconomic order he still believed in, even as age was steadily eroding that faith. This was Rajkumar Santoshi’s Khakee.
So when you see Bachchan, in the opening minutes, telling a roomful of newly trained cops that the world beyond their training will test their morals every day, with communalism and corruption waiting to wear them down, you can almost hear Salim–Javed’s Vijay speaking with the benediction of age and experience. When, later, he erupts at a fellow cop, in arguably the film’s finest scene, raging about the moral weight of the uniform, what it demands of the man who wears it, and the widening chasm between what it asks and what it ultimately makes him do, you again glimpse the Vijay who once ordered a goon to behave, reminding him that a police station was not his fiefdom and the cops were not at his disposal. Even when he lectures a mob manipulated into violence by a politician, you see Vijay again: the same instinct to restore order, but now shadowed by the knowledge of how easily that order can be undone.
The young Vijay, in Zanjeer, fought because he believed the law could prevail; the older one, in Khakee, fights because he can no longer afford to believe it will. But if, on the one hand, Santoshi re-imagined the Angry Young Man sub-textually, on the textual level, alongside his writer Shridhar Raghavan, he built Khakee as a near-perfect masala vehicle, perhaps, as one of the genre’s finest manifestations in the last two decades. So what, after all, is a masala film? As the term itself suggests, it is a cinema of collision: disparate flavours, registers and impulses thrown into the same vessel. Romance sits beside action; an arch hero finds his equally arch nemesis; dialogues are sculpted to theatrical perfection even as the conflicts remain tied to the social realities that surround them. Its peculiar pleasure lies precisely in these contradictions and in making them coexist.
And who knew the genre better than Santoshi (Ghayal, Damini, Ghatak)? So, in Khakee, at one end, you have Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai dancing to the strains of “Dil Dooba”, only to be followed by a terrific chase across a desert, alive with crowd and commotion. Similarly, you see the film’s moral fulcrum embodied in a great motherly figure (Tanuja), the cornerstone of a masala vehicle. The emotional truth of the film comes from the promise Bachchan makes to her, and the stakes are only raised when he fails to fulfil it. What the screenplay gets right, too, is its hero and villain, laying both bare in their opening scenes. Aangre (Ajay Devgn) gets a terrific villain entry: humming to a song as he calmly kills an entire family. Bachchan’s cop, meanwhile, is introduced asleep on a stage as a politician drones on, a scene that, in its brevity, tells us that this old cop has little time for the theatre of politics.
And, as if that were not enough, the writing gives both men a past: a rivalry born of an old wound, a hatred so deeply rooted that one man’s injury becomes the other’s lifelong sentence. Say, like think of Gabbar and Thakur from Sholay, where the past is not necessarily backstory but a wound that refuses to close. But above all, Khakee has a political spine, the essential marrow of great masala cinema. Look at the genre’s landmarks, Deewaar, Amar Akbar Anthony, even Main Hoon Na, and beyond their flamboyance and melodrama lies a social reality they are unwilling to look away from, one they seek to confront, challenge, sometimes even redeem. Because, after all, masala cinema, at its most potent, turns the contradictions of society into the pleasures of spectacle, and spectacle into a form of social reckoning.
That is why Khakee begins with a Muslim family being branded as anti-national; reaches its midpoint when a man condemned as a Pakistani agent reveals that he was only trying to do his job with integrity, until the state made even that impossible; and ends with his death, his body denied the dignity of burial because suspicion survives him. In his own defence, he insists that he was merely paying the price for being a Hindustani. It is haunting, and makes one wonder how many films in 2026 would still dare to have a line like that.
