Watch or skip? Salman Khan’s Sikandar hits Netflix with empty plot and over-the-top swagger, but is all forgiven if it's this Bollywood superstar

Dubai: In Sikandar, now streaming on Netflix, Salman Khan plays a modern-day monarch with no time for love — not even for his much younger, emotionally fragile wife. Instead, this Eid action drama follows a king who juggles saving a mining community, punching political enemies mid-air, and commanding loyalists who form human shields without question.

Welcome to Sikandar, yet another Salman Khan Eid spectacle — a film as subtle as a sledgehammer.

This loud film bludgeons you into believing that Bollywood’s most controversial superstar is a messiah in designer beards and sunglasses, and this one is no different. Everything is on the nose here. He plays a benevolent royal from Rajasthan who serves as a heroic figure for his hapless mining community. He’s the kind of hero with so much ground support that when he punches a minister’s son mid-flight for molesting a woman and faces arrest, his loyalists form a human chain — a sea of bodies — to block the authorities.

This is a modern-day fairytale, where the kind-hearted emperor Sikandar (Salman Khan) has no time for his nubile wife because he’s too busy dousing literal fires and explosions in the mines. But then tragedy strikes, and we see his seemingly perfect life upended.

Surrounded by a sea of loyalists, it’s disheartening to see a talented actor like Sharman Joshi reduced to playing Salman's man-Friday. Here’s a superb performer who barely gets any on-camera action — his back is almost always to the camera, facing Salman. The director seems singularly focused on extracting every ounce of Khan’s charisma and swagger, leaving the rest of the cast to flounder as either comic relief or devilish caricatures.

It’s almost as if director AR Murugadoss forgot he’s making a movie and not trying to humanise Bollywood’s bad boy — a star once accused (and later acquitted) of mowing down people with his vehicle. Like most Salman Khan vehicles, Sikandar feels like a blatant attempt at whitewashing his troubled star-kid-turned-uncle persona, wrapping it all in a crowd-pleasing, morally upright superhero package.

What’s truly baffling is the film’s brand of performative wokeness — a series of self-congratulatory moments masquerading as social progress. There’s the textbook scene of a woman being harassed by a powerful minister’s brat on a plane, only for Sikandar to swoop in with a well-placed punch and a speech on decency. Then we meet the grumpy patriarch — an ageing grandfather from the South — who refuses to let his daughter-in-law work. But by the third act, he’s pledging his house to support her business dreams, thoroughly reformed by Sikandar’s saintly intervention.

The checklist doesn’t stop there. Sexual assault subplot? Check. Teary-eyed male vulnerability? Check. A heroic confession where the protagonist admits he hasn’t been a great husband, followed by heavy sobbing and dramatic apologies? Double check. It’s as if the film wants credit for being progressive without doing the actual work of genuinely engaging with any of these issues. Everything is dipped in syrupy sentiment and designed to serve the central myth: that Sikandar is not just strong, but also sensitive — a saviour with six-pack abs and a heart of gold.

What also confounds you is the sheer lack of a coherent storyline. We’ve seen Salman Khan play the modern-day hero with a heart of gold dozens of times before — and Sikandar doesn’t even try to reinvent the formula. It lazily leans on tropes we’ve watched him recycle over the years, dressed up in new costumes but offering the same chest-thumping sermons and slo-mo struts.

Even seasoned actors like Sathyaraj — who plays the corrupt, power-hungry minister enabling his spoiled, morally bankrupt son — are reduced to loud, one-note caricatures. His performance is so gratingly over-the-top, it feels like he’s acting in a different film altogether — one that’s stuck in a loop of exaggerated villainy and theatrical dialogue.

While Rashmika Mandanna is undeniably sweet to look at, her attempt to play the royal princess feels a tad forced. She brings grace to the screen, but the role doesn’t give her much to work with beyond looking concerned or lovingly gazing at her heroic husband. At times, she feels like a stand-in from the Katrina Kaif school of performance — elegant, present, but never quite emotionally rooted in the narrative.

And then there's Kajal Aggarwal, appearing as a young woman in a patriarchal in-laws’ home — a role so at odds with her heavily Botoxed or visibly worked-on appearance that it jars with the supposed realism of her backstory as a repressed daughter-in-law. Like much of the casting here, it reeks of real-life loyalty over story relevance — the usual playbook in a Salman Khan film, where roles often go to his inner circle or long-time allies.

At its core, Sikandar plays out less like a film and more like an elaborate homage to Salman Khan himself. Every frame is carefully designed to showcase him as a glorious, larger-than-life emperor — slow-motion entries, dramatic lighting, and thunderous background scores all working overtime to elevate his presence. The rest of the characters, no matter how talented the actors, orbit around his magnanimity. They exist to applaud, support, or be reformed by the all-powerful Sikandar.

But this relentless myth-building results in saviour-on-screen fatigue. We’ve seen this version of Salman far too often — the messiah, the reformer, the protector of the weak. And Sikandar offers no reinvention. The constant need to position him as all-knowing, all-feeling, all-conquering is not just repetitive — it’s exhausting. There’s only so much slow-mo swagger and teary-eyed moralising one can take before it veers into parody.

In the end, Sikandar is less a film and more a bloated tribute reel for Salman Khan — one that leans heavily on recycled tropes. With its predictable beats, thunderous self-importance, and emotional manipulation, I’m crowning this one a non-starter — an exhausting ride that tests your patience more than it entertains.