The shirt was tucked in with a strange sort of defensive precision that I couldn't stop looking at. Salman Khan walks into the opening sequence of Sikandar looking like a man who has been told exactly how many inches of forearm skin he is permitted to show the camera, and the resulting rigidity bleeds right through the monitor. If I'm honest, it set my teeth on edge before anyone even threw a punch. You sit in the dark waiting for that old, effortless swagger to break through the armor of brand endorsements and CGI cleanup, but it never really happens. Hindi movies used to let their leading men sweat a little bit on screen. Here, every drop of moisture looks like it was applied with a spray bottle by a production assistant holding a union card.

Director AR Murugadoss has made better films than this on days when he was probably sleepwalking through a morning shift, and that is what makes the sluggish pacing so baffling. The screenplay lurches from a dimly lit board room negotiation to a village courtyard explosion with zero connective tissue, treating geography like a mild suggestion rather than a physical space. Scenes start three beats too late and end on reaction shots that linger until you start wondering what the supporting cast members are thinking about under their breath. Rashmika Mandanna tries her absolute best to inject some genuine human warmth into dialogue that sounds like it was translated from three different languages using a failing app, yet she gets stranded by editing choices that cut away from her face the second a genuine emotion threatens to register.

The supporting players wander in and out of the frame like they are filming completely different projects in neighboring soundstages. Prateik Patil Babbar chews the scenery with a manic energy that feels entirely disconnected from the low-temperature coolness Khan is attempting to project, which creates a strange friction whenever they share the screen. Sathyaraj shows up to collect a paycheck with the practiced dignity of a man who has played this exact same weary mentor figure in four dozen regional blockbusters and remembers the lines slightly better than the younger actors do. Then there is Sharman Joshi, whose brief appearances arrive with so little narrative setup that you half expect him to pull out a script and check what scene they are supposed to be shooting. It is a messy ensemble, not great, not bad, just there, taking up space between the endless action set-pieces.

Let's talk about the sound design because it bugged me from minute twelve until the credits finally mercifully crawled up. Every single time a character turns their head quickly, the foley department drops a heavy leather whoosh into the mix that sounds less like a human movement and more like a sack of wet flour hitting a linoleum floor. It is relentless. It happens when people stand up from chairs, when they reach for coffee cups, and when they blink too fast during dramatic confrontations. You start anticipating the leather sound effect instead of listening to what the actors are actually saying, which turns a standard thriller into an unintentional comedy of hyper-amplified tactile details.

Cinematographer S. Thirunavukkarasu shoots everything in shades of teal and slate grey that drained the warmth out of locations that probably looked stunning in natural sunlight. It is the same visual palette we suffered through in Kick, except without the occasional burst of genuine kinetic joy that made those earlier Salman Khan vehicles watchable on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The camera tracks backward during dialogue scenes with a mechanical smoothness that feels claustrophobic, never giving the actors room to breathe or find a natural rhythm within the frame. When the violence finally erupts, it is chopped up into so many micro-angles that you cannot tell who is hitting whom or why the fight started in the first place.

There is a half-baked political subtext bubbling beneath the surface about land grabs and corporate corruption that feels remarkably quaint for a modern big-budget spectacle. Bollywood movies have been recycling this exact same Robin Hood template since the seventies, yet usually they manage to attach it to a character who possesses some internal conflict or moral gray area. Sikandar gives us a protagonist who is pure marble from the first frame, possessing no flaws worth mentioning and no demons worth fighting. He just stands there looking stern while other people explain his motivations to him in voiceover narration that sounds like it was recorded in a broom closet three days before the premiere.

Kajal Aggarwal arrives midway through the second hour as a legal consultant who exists solely to hand the hero documents he doesn't need to read and smile approvingly whenever he punches a villain through a plate-glass window. It's a thankless role that asks for nothing and receives even less from a script that views female characters as decorative plot devices rather than actual participants in the drama. Anjini Dhawan gets a brief musical sequence that stops the narrative cold just as it was threatening to develop a pulse, proving once again that commercial Hindi cinema remains terrified of letting a thriller move at a consistent clip from start to finish.

By the time the final confrontation rolls around in an abandoned warehouse that looks suspiciously like every other abandoned warehouse built on the outskirts of Mumbai in the last twenty years, the exhaustion has settled deep into your bones. Nawab Shah plays the primary antagonist with a raspy growl that becomes unintentionally funny the fifth time he threatens to dismantle the hero's entire family tree using a baseball bat. You leave the theater wondering who this film was actually made for, since the fans deserve better than digital body-doubles and half-hearted stunt choreography, while casual viewers will likely check their phones before the first intermission and never look back up.