Director: Siddharth P. Malhotra Writers: Althea Kaushal, Mayank Tewari Producer: Alchemy Films (Siddharth P. Malhotra, Sapna Malhotra) Cast: Sunny Deol, Akshaye Khanna, Dia Mirza, Tillotama Shome, Sanjeeda Shaikh, Shishir Sharma, Akansha Ranjan Kapoor Released: Netflix, 10 July 2026
The Setup
Sunny Deol plays Arjun Mehra, a celebrated, unbeaten defence lawyer nicknamed “Ikka” (Ace) for his unblemished courtroom record and his refusal to win by any means necessary. That principle gets tested when Arjun is forced into defending Shauryamann Gaur (Akshaye Khanna), the son of an aspiring politician, on a murder charge — a man Arjun had previously and very publicly taken down in court, and whose history with Arjun and his wife carries real personal weight. To save someone he loves, Arjun has to defend someone he despises, bending his own ethics in the process.
My Take
I can see exactly why this went straight to Netflix rather than getting a theatrical release. The whole thing plays like an episode of an American legal drama — something out of Boston Legal or The Lincoln Lawyer — rather than a film built for the scale of an Indian cinema release. The storyline simply doesn’t carry the dramatic punch (no pun intended, given who’s in the title role) that a Sunny Deol cinema release usually promises.
Since Damini, audiences have quietly been waiting for Sunny to properly return to the courtroom, and Ikka gives us glimpses of that — but only glimpses. It falls short of the real thing. There’s restraint in his performance here that’s a change of pace from his more recent, louder work, but the film never quite lets him fully cut loose as the lawyer character we’ve been waiting for since 1993.
It’s also worth noting this marks Sunny Deol and Akshaye Khanna’s first time sharing the screen since JP Dutta’s Border, all the way back in 1997 — nearly three decades between collaborations. That kind of gap should have made for a genuine event of a reunion, which makes it more disappointing that the film around them doesn’t rise to match it.
My other problem: the twists are predictable if you’ve watched more than a couple of legal procedurals in your life. And Akshaye’s scowl — the lowered-head death stare, the corner-of-the-mouth delivery — has become so much of a fixed expression across his last few roles that it’s starting to feel less like a character choice and more like a default setting. Whether that’s deliberate typecasting or just how his face sits these days after the work he’s had done, I genuinely couldn’t tell you.
None of that stopped me enjoying it. The pacing never dragged, the performances were solid throughout, and the ending landed appropriately for the story being told. As a standalone film, ignoring who’s actually in it, this is a good watch. But given the combined star power of these two actors — genuinely look at either man’s back catalogue — this clash should have been a bigger, sharper, more dangerous film than it ended up being. Both of them have more to give than Ikka asked of them.
3 out of 5.
One small thing I noticed in the opening credits, worth mentioning even if it’s not really part of the review itself: Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna, the fathers of Sunny and Akshaye respectively, shared the screen together many times over the decades — Rakhwala (1971), Patthar Aur Payal (1974), Batwara (1989), Waqt Ka Badshah (1992), and Kshatriya (1993), the last of which also featured Sunny Deol himself alongside both fathers. Nice bit of trivia to have rattling around while watching the sons face off.
