New Delhi:
Think of a character. Name him Sikandar. He may or may not be the master of his destiny. Pitting a clean-cut man against a dogged lawman determined to control that man’s destiny. Lo and behold, you have a handy title that is reminiscent of Amitabh Bachchan’s megahit of 1978 with which this Netflix film has nothing to do.
words, situations and actions that Alexander’s fate The packs are in perfect order throughout their runtime of about two and a half hours, unless the creators wanted to turn back the clock so much that the entire device was on the verge of collapsing into a disorganized heap. If it doesn’t, it’s because the film isn’t really aiming that high. Therefore, the decline is not very rapid.
fate of Alexander’s fateProduced, directed and co-written by Neeraj Pandey, it is largely sealed by the ill-advised adoption and use of well-worn tropes that were once a mainstay of the Mumbai potboiler. No matter how harmless they may seem, they persist.
As passions and aspirations collide in this simple crime thriller, a cop with a spotless credential record targets a seemingly ruthless man who installs and repairs computers for a living. The main protagonist, Sikandar Sharma (Avinash Tiwari), a man from Kanpur, is both a rat and a rabbit.
The investigator, Jaswinder Singh (Jimmy Shergill), relentless in his search, is a cat and a wolf rolled into one. To him, hunting is as much a game as the chase.
The first one pays the price of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The latter suffers the consequences of delving too deeply into a matter. Sikander faces one misfortune after another as he tries to collect the pieces of a life torn to pieces by a known cop, with the latter also having to pay his share in hell.
The film begins in 2009. Four armed men plan to raid a diamond fair in Mumbai. The police have been informed. The robbery attempt has been foiled. The criminals have been killed. In the melee, five red solitaires go missing. IO Jaswinder Singh, who prides himself on his basic instincts, arrests three suspects.
Apart from Sikandar, who is at the crime scene to monitor the AV system installed there, the needle of suspicion points towards two employees of a diamond trading firm, Mangesh Desai (Rajeev Mehta) and Kamini Singh (Tamanna Bhatia).
Although Sikandar is third on the list of suspects, Jaswinder realizes that the computer technician is the one most likely to be attacked. He leaves no stone unturned to make the accused appear clean. All three declared themselves innocent.
Cut to 15 years later. Alexander moved forward. He now works for a construction company in Abu Dhabi. Back in Mumbai, Jaswinder slips away. He is dismissed from the police force (for being drunk on duty) and the same day his wife Kaushalya (Divya Dutta) divorces him.
While he is sitting on the terrace of a bar drinking, Jaswinder remembers Sikandar, whom he had thrown out of the country a decade and a half ago. It’s flashback time for the first time. And there’s more as the film zigzags its way between 2009 and the present day.
Alexander’s fate Repeatedly violates the line that separates whimsical from arbitrary. It errs more in favor of the latter. The increased fare adds very little to the bargain. There is neither spark nor shine in the film.
When Sikandar Sharma returns to Mumbai for a long-awaited meeting with his one-time tormentor, Jaswinder Singh confesses to him that his instincts once failed him. But this admission, predictably, does not mark the end of the story.
At one point in the conversation, Jaswinder suggested that Sikandar’s story should be titled Teen Deviyan (a 1965 Dev Anand film). In fact, there are three women in his life – Kamini, a single mother who was abandoned by her husband for another woman; Priya Sawant (Ridhima Pandit), a nurse who helps care for her ailing mother; and Tabassum Khan (Zoya)
Afroz), a coworker who accompanies him on weekly movie dates in Abu Dhabi.
This shows that these three, Kamini, played a greater role than others in shaping the destiny of Alexander. By the time the audience is allowed to learn what each of them brings to the table, the duel between the two men turns into an outrageously top-down affair, with more words than action. .
Even for the most ardent mystery film lovers, Sikandar Ka Muqaddar is unlikely to provide any real pleasure. Its narrative arc is completely within the bounds of the expected. From miles away one can see what’s coming, as Alexander slides into chaos and misery every time it feels like he’s close to change.
Going to Agra with my wife to take up employment in a glass factory owned by a friend’s maternal uncle bodes well. But the escape is short-lived as the setbacks become increasingly frequent and the man starts running away again to hide.
Most of the background score of Sikandar Ka Muqaddar is jarring. This hardly matches the needs of a film playing on a streaming platform. On the big screen, the decibels can get pretty loud, especially since a central idea of the film is to harken back to a bygone era. But in a smaller, more intimate format, it feels like too much.
The three lead members of the cast – Avinash Tiwari, Jimmy Shergill and Tamannaah Bhatia – strain every muscle in their dramatic arsenal to muscle their way through a film that struggles with pace and erratic energy levels.
Alexander’s fate Cleverly packaged. He needed more innovation in what he filled in his bag of tricks. The missing solitaires inevitably appear, but neither the diamonds nor the subsequent twists arising from the stones change the fate of the flagging film.
