Ikkis movie review: Agastya Nanda-Dharmendra film is a solid start to 2026, a war film that’s deeply anti-war

Ikkis movie review: Agastya Nanda’s slightly unformed mien works well for his newbie-ness.

Ikkis movie review: “Ikkis,” responds a young soldier when asked his age by a senior officer, his face thickly smeared by birthday cake. Twenty-one, when you come properly of age. Second Lt Arun Khetarpal did not live to be 22: he fought with his last breath on that climactic December day of the 1971 Indo-Pak war, becoming the youngest Army officer to be awarded a Param Vir Chakra.

Rather than just a straight-up war film about a young man’s exemplary courage, Ikkis is also an exploration of the harrowing fallout of conflict. And that makes Sriram Raghavan’s latest, co-written by him, Arijit Biswas and Pooja Ladha Surti, stand out from the overwhelmingly jingoistic, disturbingly violent features of the past few years.

Yes, soldiers are trained to kill, and dying for their country is part of the job description, but the battlefield in Ikkis, while stained red with human blood, stays away from gratuitous violence. The nobility of men who have spent their lives in the armed forces is a key feature of this film, sometimes going overboard with it. But if you ask me what I’d prefer: watching the feeling of bhaichara amongst a visiting Indian and a group of Pakistanis in the former’s old house in a village on the other side of the border, or men taking pleasure in flaying limbs, the choice is a no-brainer.

The raring-to-go Arun (Agastya Nanda) is sent off to his first war by his father Retd Brigadier Madan Khetarpal (Dharmendra) and his mother (Suhasini Mulay) in the way fauji families do: with an encouraging pat on the back, keeping fear in check. The training, under the beady eye of the Lt Colonel (Rahul Dev), experienced Risaldar Sagat Singh (Sikander Kher), along with mate Capt Vijendra Malhotra (Vivaan Shah), is briskly conducted, with Arun learning to love his tank, which he is ordered to take into battle at Basantar, a border village overrun by Pakistani tanks.

The martyred Khetarpal’s exploits are well documented in war records, making you wonder how ‘real’ were the portions that show the budding romance between the fresh-faced soldier and a pretty young lady (Simar Bhatia). The film splices scenes of the battle, with those of Madan’s retracing his son’s final route, guided by his Pakistani host Brigadier Khwaja Mohammad Naseer (Jaideep Ahlawat), who is nursing a long-held, heartbreaking secret.

You may be reminded of a few great American war films — Oliver Stone’s trilogy, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan — in Sriram Raghavan’s determined anti-war strain, which runs right through the 142-minute narrative. The spoils can be counted, but no one really wins: the human losses are on ‘both sides’, and both Madan and Naseer are indelibly marked by that tragic face-off. The back-and-forth between the timelines is distracting, a couple of the cuts calling attention to themselves. And while Dharmendra’s presence is poignant, this being his last film — I teared up in a few places, especially when he speaks of the once-unified ‘watan’ and ‘mitti’ — he is held back by his halting dialogue delivery, and pace.

Nanda’s slightly unformed mien works well for his newbie-ness. Bhatia is good as the spirited girlfriend; of the ensemble which constitutes the battalion, Kher leaps out. But this film belongs as much to Ahlawat who, as always, steals every scene in the way he melds long-held regret and resilience, and in the way he goes about making amends.

A solid start to 2026, Ikkis is a war film which makes you feel in a way that movies these days are not either able to or want to: the two ISI men who are following the two generals’ car are only doing their job, as are the men who go into battle, intent upon saving their countrymen.

Ikkis movie cast: Dharmendra, Agastya Nanda, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sikander Kher, Vivaan Shah, Suhasini Mulay, Rahul Dev, Ekavali Khanna, Simar Bhatia, Avani Rai, Deepak Dobriyal, Asrani Ikkis movie director: Sriram Raghavan Ikkis movie rating: 3 stars