DHURANDHAR - MOVIE REVIEW 
DIRECTOR-WRITER-PRODUCER - ADITYA DHAR 
RATING : 3 STARS / 5 (GOOD)
HINDI (ENGLISH SUBTITLES AVAILABLE)
RELEASE DEC. 2025 
 
 
 Aditya Dhar may be auditioning for the role of India's Defense Minister - if so, I hope he will transfer his filmic ferocity into real-life gumption. Pic, which has roared past Rs.1200 crore with the Indian audience additionally charged up by the Pahalgam massacre, is an above-average thriller about a young Indian man who is sent to infiltrate the Karachi mafia so that he may learn national security secrets. Pic chugs along with reasonable imagination, good performances and heaps of graphic violence (this is certainly not a family and kids movie). While the movie's action sequences are not top-notch, and the good screenplay had potential to be even better, Dhar's direction is assured, his demonization of Pakistani authorities is not misguided (that country wins the mother of all Olympics in terrorism and mass-murder) and he has the guts to state at more than one juncture that India could be doing much more to combat both its internal and external enemies. 
 
  Dhurandhar is a prime example of how the emergence of graphic violence has far superseded that of sex in Indian cinema - while the sex is non-existent, the violence has skyrocketed to stomach-churning levels (it's neck-to-neck in real life).
 
Story starts with two incidents that trigger Operation Dhurandhar - both real-life incidents that exposed the weaknesses of Indian authorities. The first is 1999'S flight IC 814 hijacking by the terrorist group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen who took the Indian plane to Kandahar in Afghanistan, stabbed one passenger to death and forced the release of three terrorists imprisoned by India. The second is the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the incident starting with a poorly guarded entrance to the most important building in the country. Director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) Ajay Sanyal (an excellently restrained bureaucratic act by R. Madhavan) is rankled by these ravages, and seeks to embed an Indian spy into Karachi, Pakistan's mafia circles so that national security secrets may be gleaned. 
 
Enter Hamza Ali Mazari (Ranveer Singh) who rises from A to Z inside Lyari, the ancient and mafia-ridden suburb of Karachi where top gangsters get coveted political access to Pakistan's higher echelons. Hamza soon wins favour and induction into the inner circles of Rehman Baloch (Akshay Khanna) a dreaded gangster with political ambition. Baloch's political star rises thanks to his ruthless acts and his country's natural opportunistic skulduggery. Hamza makes himself a crucial cog, thanks to unconventional bold strategies he suggests to Baloch. Despite the intelligence gathering he successfully pulls off, break-through terror cataclysms in India shake Hamza who comes to the blunt realization that he has to act swiftly before the many-jawed monster he's part of, further damages India. This being a Hindi commercial movie, love shoves its way into the mix with the delightful female presence of Yalina (twenty-year-young Sara Arjun). 
 
Pic's strength and prodigious box-office returns owe themselves to Aditya Dar's strong no-frills direction of successive interesting plot points, aided and abetted by a fistful of powerful performances. The story he's written, with additional screenplay by Ojas Gautam and Shivkumar V. Panicker, does not reach extraordinary heights but the plot turns make sense and Dhar's duty is to take these turns with the flourish of an orchestra director. Hamza's first act of bravery amidst violence, his against-the grain advice to his boss, his rise in the ranks by taking the fight right to the opposition's lair, then the love angle and so forth are smoothly covered - Dhar knows that as long as you have persuasive stars and constantly whirring plot developments of an action-packed thriller, there is little chance of going wrong with the mainstream audience he's catering to. Do something too fancy and you might even lose this audience - no need to go complicated into Pakistani politics and inner workings - leave Frederick Forsyth where he belongs and concentrate on hitting the big broad sixers.  
 
No doubt the performances further pull in the audience interest here (more than a month after release, the Auckland theatre evening show was mostly full). Main hero Hamza essayed by muscled, lean, long-haired hunk Ranveer Singh with cold strong eyes that dispassionately chart their next strategic move, anchors flick's mayhem. Slim, handsome Akshay Khanna, his hairdo stylishly fixed, angular face with the body clad in haute-traditional figure-hugging dark outfits, charms with his dimpled smile, and chills with a steel-jawed look of no-nonsense vehemence. Youthful sparkle and lovely innocence are amply supplied by Sara Arjun.
 
Music is no great shakes but smartly modernizes the mood with trippy avant-garde beats suffused into ethnic music. The Indian audience will not reward the jaw-dropping, superior quality action of "Kill" (2023) and in 'Dhurandhar' we have to make do with substandard special effects, hand-to-hand fights that rely on shaky camera movement and subpar fight choreography. The protracted mediocre flight at the climax is a waste of time for true action aficionados. On reflection, I myself wanted the film's broad thriller strokes supplanted by more sophisticated turns but perhaps that's hoping for too much. Besides, Aditya Dhar discloses invigorating flashes of coruscating honesty where similar genre film-makers would pull wool over with jingoism. It is frankly stated here that the IC 814 negotiation was weak, the IB chief rues that yesteryear Uttar Pradesh could have been doing more to stem national security rot, and a humiliating arrow is fired at one and all when the Pakistani ISI honcho remarks that if Pakistan had been similarly attacked, they would have barged into Delhi and given back the reply. Films aside, it's as if a real-life voice is pushing for a harder national defence.
   
 
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