Movie Review: Dhurandhar

If you've been living under a rock in the last two decades and missed out on our relationship with our most significant unneighbourly other, then Dhurandhar is for you. Otherwise, this fever dream from the mind of director Aditya Dhar, and inspired by strategic snippets from the National Security Advisor, is strictly Lesson 101 in How to Destabilise Pakistan.

Pakistan's Achilles Heel, the Free Balcoh Movement; the ISI's feral attack on Mumbai. now commonly known as 26/11; the mafia of drugs and arms that runs out of Karachi; and the Kandahar hijack, told from a perspective very different from Anubhav Sinha's IC 814; Dhar's Dhurandhar is like a potted history of the last 20 years. Through it all, there is one hero. No, not Ranveer SIngh, who tries his best to look like the killing machine that Hamza is supposed to be. But R Madhavan's Ajay Sanyal, super spy, super patient, super wise, given to saying enigmatic things like kismet has a strange way of coming full circle, and prescient things like we will soon have a government in Uttar Pradesh which will be strong enough to withstand fake notes business that comes in from Nepal, and the threat of riots, Dog whistles. Nope, This is full-on loudspeaker announcements.

So it is Sanyal who wisely hires a death row inmate Jaskirat, who has nothing to lose, and turns him into Hamza, a deep penetration mole into the Lyari mafia, run by Rehman Dakait aka Sher e Baloch whose face is as twisted as his mind. Played with considerable, old fashioned theatricality by Akshaye Khanna, Sher e Baloch wants to carve out his own political empire from under Jamali's shoaw (a very good Rakesh Bedi). Adding fuel to this fire are an ISI general bent upon executing Zia Ul Haq's philosophy of bleeding India by a thousand cuts; a bent police officer who is thrilled by violence, and assorted gun runners, Baloch freedom fighters, fake currency printers. There is even a special appearance by the mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks David Headley and one of the terrorists, Ajmal Kasab, in the only heart stopping scene in the movie, when all the assorted thugs are gathered around multiple screens watching Mumbai burn, with direct relays from reporters covering the Taj in real time.

We are told by the end of the movie that there is a second part due in March 2026, which is billed as the revenge, which by all accounts will be the continuation of the narrative that Singh's character espouses in the end: "Yeh  Naya Hindustan hai, hum ghar main ghus kar marte hain (This is new India, we enter your home and kill you right there}." 

With Diljit Dosanjh and Hanumankind's frenzied Ez Ez playing throughout the movie, it is an aural experience before it is visual, meant to pound your senses into submission. And then comes the blood, the dismembered heads, the chopped fingers, the gouged eyes, the homemade nooses, and various guns, small and big, The many bearded faces are so encased in blood that when they are scrubbed clean, they look almost unrecognisable. 

It is meant to be an inside look at the underbelly of Pakistani society, and it is not a particularly edifying spectacle. This is familiar ground that several streaming shows have been treading of late, from Sare Jahan Se Achha to Neeraj Pandey's Special Ops to even the odious Salaakar. The novelty is only of scale and in the appalling youth and sexualisation of its lead heroine, Sara Arjun (a particularly tone deaf move in the age of Jeffrey Epstein)