Ikkis review: Dharmendra’s final bow, Agastya Nanda lift Sriram Raghavan’s anti-war film

Upon hearing this, Khetarpal smiles wryly and responds, “Aur aaj yeh jaanbaaz ek kissaa ban gaya hai” (And today this braveheart is the stuff of legends). Not only is this a clever and poignant line, it also gives you an insight into Raghavan’s methodology with Ikkis. The purported subject of his film is the life of Arun Khetarpal, a decorated soldier and war hero who was awarded the Param Vir Chakra for his actions during the Battle of Basantar during the 1971 Indo-Pak War. Raghavan knew that Khetarpal was a tank commander.

A rousing war drama, an anti-war polemic

And the thing about tank battles is they simply aren’t inherently cinematic — certainly not in the way a swordfight or a cowboy-style gun battle is. Tanks lumber around in slow circles until they get a strategic advantage significant enough to fire a small number of heavy shells in quick succession — while they are essential to modern-day warfare (especially in challenging terrains), they don’t exactly make for riveting viewing in the context of the war movie.

Raghavan’s solution, then, is to give us two films for the price of one: Ikkis is simultaneously a rousing war drama and an anti-war polemic. It is at once a paean to the soldier’s life and a heartfelt pacifist plea told from the point of view of two grizzled, war-weary veterans — Brigadier Khetarpal and a Pakistani solider, Brigadier Nisar, (Jaideep Ahlawat) who hosts the older man during his visit to Pakistan.

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Brigadier Khetarpal wants to attend his old college’s reunion in Lahore and hopefully, also visit his ancestral village, and Nisar is a little too eager to oblige him, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Raghavan’s genius here is to ensure that the audience is equally invested in both of his major storylines — in between successive episodes from Arun’s life, he keeps pushing the Dharmendra-Ahlawat story arc forward slowly but surely, until it becomes a genuinely affecting portrayal of anti-war sentiments.

Agastya Nanda and Simar Bhatia: A charming pair

Agastya Nanda, previously seen in the Netflix series The Archies, makes his big-screen debut as Arun Khetarpal, the forever-21 soldier whose brief but impressive life makes up the other half of the film’s 145-minute runtime. Nanda is expectedly charming during the coming-of-age sequences — the slight awkwardness of debutants is a natural fit for this kind of storytelling, where you’re watching a young person make sense of their own character, their own priorities in life. And Arun, more than anything else, wants to be a soldier, even turning down an IIT seat in his single-minded pursuit to emulate his father’s heroics on the battlefield.

Arun’s training days are very well-scripted, with Sikander Kher being the standout supporting act as Arun’s training officer, the one who teaches him the ins and outs of operating a tank. Kher is enjoying an extended mid-career renaissance, fresh off his villainous turn in Monkey Man, and his performance here is hilarious and endearing in equal measure. Raghavan also makes a point of showing us just how claustrophobic and isolating tank warfare is — the sequences where Arun and his fellow soldiers are holed up inside the tank are brilliant from a technical point of view.

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The fact that Arun Khetarpal came from a relatively privileged, Westernised family helps Agastya’s performance here, because his Hindi diction would have been caught out in a different socio-political setting. His Hindi cannot completely shake off the “rich South Bombay kid” cadence just yet, but that will change with time and experience. A quick word, also, for Simar Bhatia, Akshay Kumar’s niece who plays Kiran, Arun’s girlfriend — the two made a very convincing young romantic pair onscreen, and Bhatia’s screen presence and dialogue delivery both show promise. After a long while, I was fully invested in the romantic trajectory of a young Bollywood couple, and that’s down to the two leads being charming and witty without trying too hard.

Dharmendra’s resounding send-off

The two performances that make up the beating heart of the film, however, belong to Dharmendra and Jaideep Ahlawat, respectively. Raghavan had previously given Dharmendra a late-career boost with his neo-noir classic Johnny Gaddar (2007) and it’s only fitting that one of Bollywood’s greatest leading men received a resounding send-off with this final role.

Dharmendra is immense as Brigadier Khetarpal — the impishness with which he argues with his wife (Suhasini Mulay), the warmth he radiates while meeting Pakistani strangers, the wholesomeness of watching him recite a Punjabi poem about his old village…. If you, like me, grew up watching this man’s films, you will find it difficult not to tear up during these sequences. And you can tell that everybody involved in this project, not least Ahlawat, is genuinely thrilled to act with him and witness the legend in the flesh.

Thanks to Dharmendra’s large-hearted performance, his half of the film becomes a kind of modern-day equivalent of Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), one of the great anti-war films and one that expressed its powerful pacifist message through the POV of a wheelchair-bound former soldier.

When Dharmendra and Jaideep Ahlawat finally visit the site of Arun’s martyrdom, the older man remarks that against all odds, flowering trees have blossomed miraculously in the middle of that field. “Kitni ziddi hai yeh zameen, barood iski mitti mein ghulaa hua hai aur yeh phir bhi har-sabz ho gayi” (How stubborn this land is — dynamite is mixed in the soil and yet, somehow, its every inch is covered by greenery).