‘Ikka’: A strong case, poorly argued

Courtroom dramas have one unfair advantage over most genres: they come preloaded with conflict. Truth squares off against perception, morality wrestles with legality, and every cross-examination promises the possibility that the room might tilt on a single sentence. ‘Ikka’ has all those ingredients. It simply doesn’t know when to stop seasoning them.

That is particularly unfortunate at a time when Bollywood’s OTT landscape has been flooded with legal dramas, each attempting to find a fresh angle on familiar questions of justice and morality.

The film follows Arjun Mehra (Sunny Deol), the celebrated and righteous lawyer whose reputation has earned him the nickname “Ikka” — the ace no one expects to lose. Forced into defending Shauryamann Gaur (Akshaye Khanna), the spoilt adult heir to an industrialist-politician, who is accused of attacking and assaulting a young woman, Arjun finds himself arguing for a man he neither likes nor entirely trusts.

Prosecutor Madhura Banerjee (Tillotama Shome) stands opposite him in court, while, away from the legal battle, Arjun and his wife Avantika (Dia Mirza) navigate their daughter’s battle with leukaemia. It is a compelling moral knot, one that could have sustained the film all by itself. Instead, ‘Ikka’ keeps looking for bigger fireworks.

We first meet Arjun addressing a legal seminar, and right off the bat, you realise the film has brought not only the ‘Damini’ (1993) star to the small screen, but also the larger-than-life Bollywood grammar of that era.

Sunglasses indoors, a hero’s entry through a splitting screen, applause ringing through the hall — it is a measure of bravado I am not convinced many celebrated lawyers command in real life.

It becomes clear that nuance and silence will be sacrificed here at the altar of thunderous background music and slow-motion heroics. The film rarely lets an argument breathe before insisting that you applaud it. That is perhaps its greatest weakness. It mistakes volume for persuasion.

There was a time when Hindi courtroom dramas thrived on precisely this brand of operatic excess. Lawyers thundered, judges gasped, galleries erupted. ‘Ikka’ clearly wants to bottle that nostalgia. The difference is that audiences have since learnt that tension can whisper too.

Deol, in his first OTT outing, delivers an earnest, if occasionally misplaced, performance. He takes time to settle into a narrative that demands smaller victories rather than grandstanding, but his eagerness to play a more conflicted, vulnerable man is undeniable.

Director Siddharth P Malhotra deserves credit for resisting the temptation to write yet another invincible alpha male. Arjun falters, doubts, and breaks. That an actor so synonymous with machismo embraces those vulnerabilities is refreshing, even if the performance occasionally buckles under the film’s theatrical instincts.

Also, any actor who can unironically attempt to utter a line like, “I often struggled to understand what doctors write, but today I struggled to understand what the doctor said”, during one of the film’s most emotionally loaded scenes deserves, at the very least, a pat on the back.

Arjun’s complexity, however, is denied to Shauryamann. The film frames him with swaggering slow-motion entrances and triumphant cinematic treatment despite the gravity of the allegations against him, a creative choice that often feels tonally misplaced, even perverse.

Khanna remains effortlessly watchable because few actors weaponise a half-smile quite like he does.

Then there is Shome, making one of her more commercial outings, while quietly walking away with the film. There is something almost uncanny about the way she inhabits a character, as though every trace of her personhood has been stripped away. While everyone else seems to be performing for the last row, she plays Madhura like someone who has an actual job waiting once the court adjourns. Her restraint lends ‘Ikka’ a credibility it does not sometimes earn.

Mirza, meanwhile, delivers an earnest, if uneven, turn as a mother watching the courtroom seep into her home.

Between Shome, Mirza, and the criminally underserved Sanjeeda Shaikh, who plays Shauryamann’s wife, the film’s emotional centre lies not in the swaggering slow-motion entrances of the men it so desperately wants us to applaud, but in the quiet ache, resilience and hunger the women carry.

The irony is that ‘Ikka’ already possesses a fascinating question: can justice survive when the person defending it no longer believes in his own brief? Every time the film leans into that dilemma, it comes alive.

Beneath all the slow motion, bombast and Bollywood reflexes lies a courtroom drama with some semblance of a pulse.

Sadly, it spends too much of its running time trying to drown out its own heartbeat, entirely unsure of what it wants to say.