Akshay Kumar and Vipul Amrutlal Shah have worked together six times across two decades. The interesting part isn’t the number of films. It is how little those films resemble one another. A heist thriller was followed by a family drama, then a cross-cultural romance, an action comedy, a time-travel fantasy and a military action thriller. Now, with Samuk, the actor-producer partnership is moving into alien survival horror.Shah himself has previously said he deliberately avoided repeating genres with Kumar. That makes Samuk a reunion which isn’t harping on nostalgia but the latest extension of a partnership whose defining feature has been reinvention.
Here is the six-film journey, ranked.
1. Aankhen (2002)
The film that established just how unconventional this combination could be. Shah made his directorial debut with this dark heist thriller, which featured Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Arjun Rampal and Paresh Rawal. Kumar played one of three blind men recruited to rob a bank, hardly the standard commercial-star vehicle of its time.The film remains their most striking collaboration because the premise was audacious, the casting was unexpected and Shah put Kumar in a considerably darker world than the actor was then associated with.
Namastey London (2007)
This is where Shah demonstrated how effectively he could recast Kumar. Five years after Aankhen and two years after the father-son drama Waqt, Kumar became Arjun Singh, the Punjabi munda at the centre of a cross-cultural love story with Katrina Kaif. The film became a defining romantic role for Kumar and one of Shah’s most successful directorial ventures. It also perfectly shows Shah’s stated approach – the next Akshay film should not look like the last one.
Singh Is Kinng (2008)
Shah wasn’t the director here, Anees Bazmee was but as producer, he again put Kumar in a completely different commercial world. Kumar’s Happy Singh, an accident-prone villager who finds himself in the middle of the criminal underworld, became one of his most popular comic characters. The film remains one of the biggest commercial successes of the partnership.
Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty (2014)
By this point Kumar was firmly established as an action star, but Holiday still gave the partnership another canvas. Produced by Shah and directed by A.R. Murugadoss, the film cast Kumar as an army officer uncovering a sleeper-cell network. Shah once again brought international action expertise into the production, with British stunt coordinator Greg Powell attached.
Waqt: The Race Against Time (2005)
Coming immediately after Aankhen, Waqt could hardly have been more different. Shah directed and produced the Amitabh Bachchan-Akshay Kumar father-son drama, shifting the focus from crime and suspense to family and emotion. The film was not their biggest commercial success, but it is an important chapter in the partnership because it established the genre-hopping pattern early.
Action Replayy (2010)
The weakest commercial performer of the six, but perhaps the most revealing experiment. Shah’s time-travel romantic comedy sent Kumar and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan between eras and leaned heavily into fantasy. And it delivered some of their most underrated works, especially albums as scenes from the film continue to make it to our reels.
And now, Samuk – the seventh collaboration – takes the genre leap further than any of the six before it.Directed by Kanishk Varma and produced by Shah, with Aashin A Shah as co-producer, Samuk is an alien survival thriller that combines grounded action, military influences, practical creature effects and horror. Academy Award-nominated creature designer Alec Gillis, whose credits include the Alien and Predator franchises and Alien: Romulus, has designed its creature, while British stunt coordinator Luke Tumber is overseeing the action.So while Samuk is being sold as a large-scale theatrical spectacle, its most interesting selling point may be something much simpler – after six films, Shah and Kumar have still found a genre they haven’t done together and aren’t we all seated to relish another unexpected ride with them!