Khakee
- Director
- Rajkumar Santoshi
- Studio
- DMS Films Private Limited
- Release Date
- 23 January 2004
- Running Time
- 180 min
- Language
- Hindi
- Country
- India
- Budget
- ₹26.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹45.40 Cr
Review
Rakesh Roshan delivers a competent but frustratingly uneven thriller that coasts on star power and occasional bursts of genuine tension rather than sustained narrative excellence. The premise of a cross-country prisoner transport under siege has meat on it, yet the execution veers wildly between tight action sequences and bloated melodrama. Ajay Devgn, Shah Rukh Khan, and Amitabh Bachchan do solid work within their respective lanes—Devgn especially carries the moral weight of the ensemble—but the film asks them to carry too much emotional baggage in scenes that feel needlessly extended. The cat-and-mouse dynamic between the squad and Aangre (a genuinely menacing turn by Sanjay Dutt) works when the film trusts its action, but stumbles whenever it tries to layer in personal revelations and philosophical debates about duty versus conscience.
What ultimately undermines Khakee is its fundamental inability to decide what kind of film it wants to be. Is it a heist thriller? A character study about corruption? A redemption arc? The answer appears to be "all of the above," which results in a bloated runtime where pivotal character moments feel grafted on rather than organic. The twist regarding Dr. Ansari's true nature arrives with potential but gets suffocated by overwrought exposition. Roshan's direction shows technical competence—the action choreography is crisp, the cinematography captures the grimness of the journey effectively—but lacks the precision needed to make every scene
Storyline
So basically, this cop named DIG Naidu puts together this special police squad to transport a guy named Dr. Ansari from one city to another. The squad is made up of five different officers with varying ranks, and their job is to get this prisoner safely to Mumbai. But here's where it gets messy—there's this dangerous criminal called Aangre who's hell-bent on stopping them and ruining the whole operation. He keeps showing up and trying different things to derail their mission.
While they're traveling, the team picks up this schoolteacher named Mahalakshmi who tells them about some suspicious people hanging around her school. They take her along with Ansari and hit the road toward Mumbai, but Aangre keeps creating chaos and obstacles wherever they go. At one point their vehicle breaks down, so they end up staying at this isolated house in the middle of nowhere. That's when the team realizes that Aangre isn't just some random bad guy—he's actually a corrupt former cop that one of the officers, Anant, had arrested years ago for killing innocent people during a botched bank robbery operation.
As the journey continues, things get really intense when Aangre and his crew launch a full attack on the team at the bungalow. There's tension within the group about what to do, especially when one officer considers handing over Ansari. But then the prisoner reveals something shocking that completely changes everything they thought they knew about the situation and his real danger.
