A RAW agent buried inside the violent heart of Lyari’s gang wars, answering to rival warlords and corrupt officials while hunting the man behind decades of terror, this is the world Aditya Dhar drops you into without a safety net. If you survived the first Dhurandhar and wanted it bloodier, more politically tangled, and less forgiving, this sequel is exactly that gamble paying off.
Ranveer Singh Disappears Into Hamza Ali Mazari, And That’s Both the Film’s Strength and Its Gamble
Ranveer Singh plays Hamza, a RAW operative who inherits Rehman Dakait’s gang after his death and must hold it together under pressure from Major Iqbal, Jameel Jamali, and shadowy political handlers. The role demands someone who can be menacing and morally corroded simultaneously, Singh leans into that ambiguity without blinking.
The film’s core tension is whether Hamza is still a patriot or has genuinely become the monster he was sent to infiltrate. Singh never lets that question settle. That sustained unease is the best thing he brings to this franchise.
Aditya Dhar’s Timeline Games Are Clever, But the Screenplay’s Architecture Has Blind Spots
Dhar’s sharpest directorial choice is the non-linear storytelling around Jaskirat’s backstory. The timeline manipulation that eventually ties to the introduction of the film’s national enemy, revealed as Dawood Ibrahim, is the kind of structural confidence that separates genre craftsmen from genre imitators.
The screenplay’s pacing is described as breakneck, which works during the power-shift sequences but leaves little room for the political texture to breathe. When everyone in a frame has an agenda, you need at least one scene that slows down and lets the ideology calcify. Here, that patience is missing.
The non-linear structure also risks losing viewers who haven’t seen the first film. Dhar assumes familiarity, and that assumption occasionally becomes a wall rather than a door.
The Spy Thriller Machinery Runs on Real History, For Better and Worse
Dhar roots the fiction in documented horror, the 1999 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks all feed the narrative architecture. This gives the covert operation sequences an unnerving weight. You know the stakes aren’t invented.
The prolonged action sequence depicting Lyari gang warfare is the film’s most visceral stretch. It uses grotesque violence not for shock but to show how deep Hamza’s cover has sunk, a useful distinction that not every spy thriller bothers to make.
The climax, culminating in SP Chaudhry Aslam’s death and the beginning of the unknown gunmen saga, lands with genuine procedural dread. It’s the moment the film transitions from personal revenge thriller to something with geopolitical consequence, and that shift earns it.
If you enjoy Hindi spy thrillers built on operational detail rather than pure spectacle, Hindi Thriller reviews on this site cover several titles worth stacking against this one.
Arjun Rampal, Sanjay Dutt, and Madhavan Are Used as Pressure Points, Not Characters
Arjun Rampal’s Major Iqbal is the film’s most interesting antagonist construction. He isn’t simply a villain, he’s an institutional force, someone whose demands on Hamza come from a position of structural authority rather than personal malice. That distinction matters in a story about how systems corrupt individuals.
Sanjay Dutt and R. Madhavan appear in roles the film keeps deliberately opaque at the promotional stage. That opacity is itself a storytelling choice, both are presences the script likely deploys as late-game variables. Their casting signals that Dhar intends every supporting slot to carry narrative function, not just star wattage.
The Propaganda Question Follows This Film Like a Second Shadow
Fictionalized RAW operations on Pakistani soil, terror attacks attributed to state-sponsored networks, and a villain roster drawn from real geopolitical grievances, Dhurandhar: The Revenge has been called propaganda before it even opened. That label is worth examining honestly.
I think the more useful question isn’t whether the film has a political point of view, it clearly does, but whether that point of view overwhelms the craft. Here, it doesn’t fully, largely because Dhar is more interested in showing how the machinery of revenge operates than in delivering a victory lap. The moral blur is real, even if the flag-waving is audible underneath.
Who Should Watch This, and How
If you want a spy thriller that treats its audience as capable of tracking shifting allegiances, corrupt institutions, and morally compromised protagonists, this delivers. It is not a comfortable film, and it doesn’t try to be. Watch it with someone who saw the first one, the context matters more than Dhar lets on.
Fans of Itllu Arjuna who responded to its restrained, interior performance mode will find an interesting counterpoint in Ranveer Singh’s more externalized intensity, Itllu Arjuna review in that film makes a fascinating contrast worth reading.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a flawed but genuinely ambitious franchise entry that earns its place on the big screen, Ranveer Singh’s commitment to Hamza’s moral corrosion and Dhar’s structural confidence make this a solid 3.5 out of 5, recommended for audiences who want their spy cinema to leave a bruise rather than a smile.
If the crime-drama intersection with dangerous political ambiguity interests you, Manithan Deivamagalam verdict in Manithan Deivamagalam operates in strikingly similar moral grey zones.
