Barely five minutes into Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar, the shape of the next three and half hours reveals itself. The year is 1999, and the Kandahar hijacking has turned a plane into a pressure chamber. Inside, Ajay Sanyal (R Madhavan), IB Chief, tries to kindle resolve. He calls out, “Bharat Mata ki…”, expecting the hostages to supply the familiar reply. The silence that follows is heavy, almost accusatory. He repeats himself. The silence only thickens. Behind him, a Pakistani hijacker raises his gun and laughs at the spectacle of a man whose authority has collapsed in real time. He taunts him with, “You Hindus are so cowardly.” The line is baffling, but it clarifies what Dhar is pursuing. He seeks agitation and friction. He desires deliberate unsettling of old sediment. He aims to trigger, to escalate, to divide. And he folds this intent into the broad sweep of a crime epic, deploying its gore and earthiness to mask the bigotry. These two impulses, political incitement and operatic storytelling, should nullify each other. Instead, he binds them, forming a film driven by contradiction, like two mismatched halves of Harvey Dent’s fractured face.
He achieves this through a series of smart narrative choices, chief among them is moving away from the traditional confines of espionage and steering the story closer to a gangster saga. Much of the narrative unfolds in Pakistan, taking us deep into the heart of its underworld nexus. And, perhaps the most subversive choice of all is that Hamza (Ranveer Singh), the spy deployed by Sanyal to infiltrate Pakistan’s deeply entrenched terror networks, gradually recedes into the background, while crime kingpin Rehman Dakait (a superb Akshaye Khanna) taking center stage, alongside Sanjay Dutt’s cop Chaudhary Aslam and local politician Jameel Jamali (Rakesh Bedi). These are fully realized, flesh-and-blood characters, often saying the most whistle-worthy lines. Dhar deepens the narrative by placing it against the backdrop of Balochistan’s struggle for self-determination and the way it shapes rivalries between local gangs and the Pashtuns. Even though many plot points follow a predictable arc, watching these forces collide and confront one another maintains some solid engagement.
Akshaye Khanna seems to be having the most fun in Dhurandhar as the crime kingpin.
To cap it all, Aditya Dhar flaunts his craft with some serious ingenuity. He understands the architecture of anticipation, the careful accumulation of tension, and the satisfaction of a delayed payoff. Consider the introduction of Akshaye Khanna in the film. The entry scene is timed long after his presence has been repeatedly referenced. The scene itself is unassuming, yet it establishes his aura without any spectacle. Similarly, his use of intertitles, the choice to go with a techno-qawwali during a chase, to play a Ghulam Ali ghazal in an unexpected context, hints at competency. And yet, the fundamental question remains the same: to what end is this skill applied? If the purpose is primarily to antagonise, what does it reveal about the harm such a craft chooses to inflict? If the purpose is primarily to stoke animosity, what moral function does this mastery of craft serve? Technique divorced from conscience risks becoming mere manipulation.
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This is laid bare in the film’s most haunting moment: the screen bleeds red, a minute stretches, and transcripts of the 26/11 Mumbai attackers’ conversations with their handlers in the ISI scroll before us. All that pierces the silence is the relentless repetition of a single word: “kaafir” (infidels). Before this, we witness Hamza in a room where Pakistan’s highest officials exult in the slaughter of innocents, chanting “Allah hu Akbar” as if cruelty were devotion. The film reduces a faith to a caricature of barbarism, equating an entire religious community with violence, deriding their lives, and turning them into hate-mongers. Just to achieve polarization. In fact, empathy, and respect for the martyrs of 26/11, for their humanity, none of it appears. Vengeance alone dictates the narrative; everything is twisted into a spectacle of hate. And yet, elsewhere, the story sways into absurdity. In the mid-2000s, Sanyal discovers terror outfits in Pakistan circulating counterfeit notes to fund attacks in India. When asked to act, he insists on waiting for a stronger, more patriotic leader. If he waits for his ‘ache din,’ then we too wait for Dhar to realize the true potential of the material he has. Instead, he is fixated solely on delivering propaganda masquerading as entertainment.
