05 December,2025 10:26 PM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
Dhurandhar review
Aditya Dhar's directed Dhurandhar. The latter is supposedly an operation by Indian intelligence that's literally a one-man mission, set in the Lyari neighbourhood of Karachi, Pakistan.
The former debuted with Uri (2019), a pure actioner, posing as the untold classified story of Indian Army's retaliation to the terrorist attack on a brigade headquarters in Jammu & Kashmir, 2016.
It'd appear Dhar's core competence lies in some sorta super serious access to state agencies that supply him unlimited info on events - seemingly unknown to politicians, bureaucrats, think tanks, journalists combined - to script stories behind India's biggest undercover moves, suitably chapterised.
Such was the case with Uri, shot in Siberia. As with Article 370, written-produced by Dhar. Likewise, Dhurandhar.
Which, though, opens with immense promise for one of the most powerful underworld dramas, witnessed in Hindi movies, for the longest.
Treat this, foremost, as âSatya of Karachi', if you may, veering toward Sarkar, on occasion, exhilaratingly dealing with empowered dons of another maximum city, right across the Arabian Sea, from Mumbai.
As it is, those who've been to Mumbai and Karachi find enough similarities between both, including its 1990s like chaotic underworld (Mutthahida Quami Movement; MQM), its messy links with politicians (Pakistan People's Party; PPP), their ganglords getting elevated in organised crime, and hit-men roaming the streets, equally dodging âencounter specialists'.
For a book recco, consider Anatol Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011).
To be fair, Satya was written, directed by filmmakers, who were themselves new to Mumbai.
Fairer still to suggest, Dhurandhar has been performed, written, directed by those who haven't ever stepped a foot in Karachi, and perhaps never will.
So, never mind this dust-bowl for a city that, by and large, seems wholly bereft of a single modern building, and looks mostly bombed-out, between multiple ghettos.
But that's roughly how the West shows the brown Third World in actioners with a certain sepia tone (check: Extraction, set in Dhaka, Bangladesh).
Clichés like Roohafza for prop, or Ghulam Ali for background music, is all about that you'll get to seep into the setting! Karachi = corny.
Zero in on the key characters, instead. They're indeed based on well-known blokes of the Lyari underworld. Top result on Google should show you that. And that's what, first, got me hugely engaging with this drama.
That is, matching real-life men to this mob opera. Whether that be the famously shifty Karachi cop, known for extrajudicial killings, âChaudhary Aslam Khan' (Sanjay Dutt).
Or the cousin in the crime syndicate, âUzbair Baloch', who will eventually rise up the ranks to rule. Indeed, even the MQM politician, i.e. the adorable comedian, Rakesh Bedi, looking more like Tikku Talsania, who's the Bhau-type fella from Satya!
But more so, you can't take your eyes off Rahman Dakait. As in Akshaye Khanna, the lean mean machine, letting his quiet, laconic expressions, as usual, steal the damn show. He's making a happy habit of bringing gravitas to mania on the mainstream screen.
Take him as Aurangzeb in Chhaava (2025). Take him out of it. The whole movie is simply a bunch of warriors screeching their lungs out.
Watch him here, even as he suddenly shrieks on the mic, in the brilliantly executed mass-rally sequence, where Rahman Dakait is publicly endorsed by PPP. You just wanna watch him more, and more.
With just enough subtlety, and some confidence in the written material, Dhurandhar had the makings of a sufficiently desi Godfather!
But this isn't an underworld drama. Those guys I'm referring to appear more like contextless villains in a completely blood-and-gore orgy, to do with an Indian hero, who's infiltrated the Baloch mob.
This hero lands without any personal backstory, whatsoever, except that he's been planted by the top Intelligence Bureau mandarin, the wonderfully cast R Madhavan, as an Ajit Doval like figure, and personally approved by the Indian Prime Minister.
That's the long-haired, heavy-hitter Ranveer Singh, as Rambo, more like El Mariachi/Antonio Banderas, in a curry western, causing mayhem as he goes along, surrounded by Kalashnikovs, two-door Datsuns, dragging blokes through the streets, breaking knuckles, killing men by the minuteâ¦
This Indian dude is a desperado, not very different from any other spy of the James Bond mould, where the stakes are phenomenally high, and the man, in service of the state, will win all.
If this looks like some kinda jingoist propaganda; well, all spy thrillers, by their very nature/genre, are. That's not the issue, if it ever was.
The issue is if you're more interested in the villains than the hero of the bloody piece as he's gaslighting a 19-year-old girl, while, apparently, in love with her.
And that he sits in a room with everyone, from the local mafia to the ISI, handholding 26/11 attackers from live TV, in Karachi.
The screen turns red. You hear the actual recorded conversations between these handlers and terrorists from Hotel Taj.
The next scene is Ranveer as Hamza with a dialogue about Ghayal and Ghatak, as if reprising Sunny Deol. Tiger-type spy universes make no claim to documentary truths. You see them for what they are.
It's hard when to take this film seriously, and how to let it simply go - as characters turn into caricatures, and morning slip into late afternoon, with Dhurandhar going on for way over three and half hours. And it's still to be continued, when it finally ends!
As it is, I've lost count of the number of films with a lone Indian spy in the midst of Pak establishment, lately.
Some, at best, hit the board, but miss the mark, say, Saare Jahan Se Accha (2025), Netflix series, that this film should've been. At least one, Raazi (2018), pierced the bull's eye.
This one's eyeing footfalls like Pushpa 2! Look at the kinda money they've spent on making it. But I would've spent the exact same amount of money, watching something less muddled, more sorted too; no?
