Dhurandhar baar baar
I am not the kind of person who goes back to the theater to watch a movie a second time. Until Dhurandhar. I watched it twice. In the theater. And I watched part 2, Dhurandhar: The Revenge.
And I am not even embarrassed about it.
After the success of Uri: The Surgical Strike, Aditya Dhar had set expectations sky high; with Dhurandhar, he came back and cleared that bar again. In Dhurandhar, the director builds an Indian spy thriller set in Lyari, Pakistan, and rooted in real historical events: the IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, 26/11, and even demonetization, and weaves them into a fictional narrative so seamlessly that you forget where history ends and storytelling begins. That takes craft.
But first, let me address the lion in the room: Ranveer Singh.
Now, I am a die-hard fan of Shah Rukh Khan; SRK can communicate entire novels with just his eyes. So it is not easy for me to say that in Dhurandhar, Ranveer Singh gives King Khan a run for his money. The way Ranveer conveys so much with his eyes alone, first as Hamza and later as Jaskirat, is exceptional. Ranveer doesn’t play this role with his usual high-energy fireworks. He is quiet. He is layered. He is devastating.
Both movies, Dhurandhar and Dhurandhar: The Revenge, belong entirely to Ranveer Singh. That’s not an easy feat when you have Akshaye Khanna and Arjun Rampal in the same frame.
The lion’s mane
And then there is the hair. I know, we are supposed to be talking about espionage and geopolitics and generational filmmaking. But I would be doing a disservice to every woman who sat in that theater if I didn’t address this. Ranveer Singh’s hair in this movie deserves its own post. The man is playing a deep cover operative inside Karachi’s most dangerous criminal network, people are getting shot, cities are burning, terror plots are unfolding, and somehow his hair looks like he just walked out of a salon in Bandra. I can guarantee that at some point during both films, every woman in that theater leaned over and whispered, “I need his hair care routine.” It is honestly unfair. The rest of us are out here fighting humidity and he is infiltrating Pakistani underworld syndicates with perfect hair!
Akshaye Khanna as Rahman Dakait is just as electrifying. His face-offs with Ranveer are some of the most intense scenes I have seen in Indian cinema in a long time. No over-the-top action, no CGI heroics, just two actors going at each other with sheer screen presence and tension.
Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal is menacing and cold. He carries a quiet threat in every scene. His character, however, feels a shade paler compared to what Akshaye Khanna brought to Part 1. Akshaye’s Dakait had layers, unpredictability, and an electric danger that made every scene he was in feel alive. Major Iqbal is threatening, but the character as written doesn’t quite reach those heights. That is not a knock on Arjun Rampal’s performance; he delivers. It is more that Akshaye Khanna set a bar in Part 1 that would be difficult to match.
But the biggest revelation of the Dhurandhar saga for me was Rakesh Bedi. In a film full of big names and big performances, Rakesh Bedi was second only to Ranveer Singh. Giving a performer like Rakesh Bedi the space to do something this remarkable, and then watching him absolutely own it, is Dhar’s great gift to Bedi fans.
The cinematography and direction in Part 1 are stunning.
And the music deserves a post of its own. Shashwat Sachdev does a highly memorable job of bringing back old classics I grew up with, reworking them, and fitting them into the movie so naturally that they don’t feel like nostalgia bait; they feel organic to the story. The background score is relentless during the action and haunting during the emotional beats.
The music of these films is a character in itself.
The tide turns in Dhurandhar: The Revenge
Dhurandhar is nearly four hours long, but it does not drag. I have sat through two-hour films that felt much longer. For Dhurandhar — its structure, the chapter-by-chapter storytelling, the pacing — it all works. The screenplay is tight. The world-building pulls you in and doesn’t let go.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge, however, I loved it a tad bit less. Now that the plot is clear in Part 1, the mystery and discovery that made Dhurandhar feel like a journey disappear a little in the second film. It also feels more documentary than storytelling, and that shift is noticeable. Part 1 felt like living inside a world; Part 2 sometimes feels like watching the world from the outside.
There are also scenes in Part 2 that could have been edited out without losing anything pertinent. For instance, a scene involving the killing of medical students added nothing to the narrative.
Which brings me to something I want to address: the gore. I am genuinely not a fan of gory, violent cinema. And I found myself wondering more than once why Aditya Dhar felt the need to go to the level of graphic detail he did in the violent sequences across both films. I understand the world he is depicting is brutal. I understand realism demands honesty. But there is a line between visceral and gratuitous, and at certain moments, it crossed it for me. The gore is the one place where I felt Dhar could have pulled back and the film would have been stronger for it.
In a TikTok world, Dhurandhar holds court
We live in a world that is being aggressively reshaped by algorithms. Every platform – Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, you name it — is claiming that short form is king. Attention spans are shrinking. Long form is dying. Movies are losing to reels. Nobody has the patience to sit through anything longer than 60 seconds anymore.
In walks Aditya Dhar, with two movies that together clock in at nearly seven and a half to eight hours of runtime. Not a Netflix binge series you can pause and come back to. Two theatrical films, meant to be watched in a cinema hall, each pushing close to four hours. And millions of people, not just in India, but across the world, watched every single minute of it.
That is proof that the hunger for great long-form storytelling is not dead. When the content is exceptional, when the direction is this tight, when the performances are this compelling, people will stay and come back for more.
Aditya Dhar did not beat the algorithm. He simply reminded the world that the algorithm does not get to decide what moves people. Great storytelling does.
Blockbuster numbers despite bans
Dhurandhar collected over ₹1,350 crore (~US $145 m) worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Indian film of 2025 and the highest-grossing A-certified Indian film of all time.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge became the first Bollywood film and only the third Indian film ever to cross ₹1,000 crore (over $100 m) net at the domestic box office.
In North America, it dethroned Baahubali 2: The Conclusion‘s long-standing record, crossing $25 million to become the highest-grossing Indian film in that territory.
With over ₹1,525 crore (~$165 m) already collected worldwide, Dhurandhar 2 is snapping at the heels of Pushpa 2‘s record of ~ $205 m. This is especially remarkable because the film was denied a theatrical release across several West Asian nations, meaning it achieved all of this without the Gulf market, which is typically a massive revenue driver for Indian films.
To put the franchise in full perspective, Dhurandhar is the only Indian film series to have two films each crossing ₹1,000 crore (over $100 m) worldwide.
The audience did not just watch these movies. They showed up again and again.
I already told you what I did. I went back a second time. Turns out, so did everyone else.
