Dhurandhar: An Espionage Epic That Refuses Moral Evasion

Braving Delhi’s hazardous air quality with the AQI touching 450, I stepped into an IMAX auditorium to see what the growing clamour around ‘Dhurandhar’ was about. The risk proved worthwhile, well, almost. At its strongest, the film is an immersive spy epic that channels India’s national-security anxieties into compelling popular cinema and is both stylistically violent and hyper masculine. It lingers long after the credits roll, offering a layered and unsentimental view of cross-border conflict that has rarely been attempted before in mainstream Indian filmmaking.

Structured in chapters spanning nearly a decade, the film follows a covert Indian operation in which Hamza, a small-town Punjabi youth with a criminal past, is methodically repurposed into a deep-cover asset embedded in Karachi’s Lyari underworld. His mission is to infiltrate the crime-terror-ISI nexus that flourished during the late 1990s and early 2000s. By invoking events such as the IC-814 hijacking, the Parliament attack and the 2008 Mumbai carnage, the film captures a not-so-long-ago era of an India under siege.

Ranveer Singh delivers one of the most controlled performances of his career, shedding his earlier flamboyance for a brooding physicality that seems organically attained. Akshaye Khanna is exceptional in a pivotal role that marks a confident second inning. As a gangland strategist, he emerges as a key fulcrum of the narrative, bringing cold calculation and moral ambiguity to the operation. Arjun Rampal’s composite antagonist, perched atop ISI influence and underworld authority, functions as a symbol of a deeply entrenched system that weaponises chaos while maintaining plausible deniability. Sanjay Dutt’s SP Chawdhary provides the field-level counterpoint to the covert world, grounding the story in visible state authority. Rakesh Bedi adds another shade to the film’s spectrum of menace, while R. Madhavan contributes intellectual and institutional heft, embodying the analytical rigour behind India’s covert machinery. The casting coup curated by Mukesh Chhabra clearly delivers due to its precision.

For me, Ranveer as Hamza was a delight to watch. The role isn’t written as a conventional hero but as a state-forged instrument, an embodiment of how individual trauma is absorbed and redeployed in service of national purpose. However, the details of his trauma remain undisclosed in this instalment. Ranveer commands the screen with a physically magnetic performance that is stealthy and ferocious and his presence is amplified by cinematography that understands exactly how to frame his allure. Hamza is anything but verbose. Instead, his mystique and the corrosion of identity are conveyed through posture, silence and continuous momentum that he brings on. The effect is unsettling and effective. At times, one is sucked into an emotional and psychological vacuum, only to realise that operatives like Hamza are trained not to emote, but to endure.

The narrative is dense and multi-layered, incorporating gang-war tropes alongside Sindhi Baloch identity tensions, arms trafficking, counterfeit currency, regional politics and institutional complicity. While this complexity adds texture, it occasionally overwhelms character development. Figures like Rahman Dakait, who were feared but locally legitimised amid the failure of functioning governance, are at times eclipsed by the film’s fixation on gory violence, where flying severed fingers and crushed skulls crowd out a more psychologically compelling portrait of power and patronage.

One of Dhurandhar’s most striking achievements is its recreation of Lyari as a dense, oppressive urban labyrinth, a pressure cooker waiting to explode rather than a postcard. The cinematography prioritises its ruggedness over gloss, grounding the action in decrepit buildings and narrow alleys. The violence is unsparing and brutally realistic. The music leans retro, with familiar lyrics such as ‘Rambha Ho’, ironically underscoring scenes of relentless brutality, while the background score throughout the film remains unsentimental.

Under Aditya Dhar’s assured direction, the film announces itself as a forceful assertion of Indian agency in a genre long marked by moral hedging and implausible romanticism. His direction is taut and disciplined, staging violence and intrigue without flourish and sustaining a tone of operational seriousness that reinforces the film’s core argument: national security is a grave and grinding business. While the film’s ambition leads to a narrative sprawl and an extended runtime, ‘Dhurandhar’ pairs its visual scale with an unambiguous depiction of patriotic ethos forged by India’s lived memories of restraint and betrayal.

As genre cinema, ‘Dhurandhar’ succeeds as a high-stakes espionage thriller that fuses underworld brutality with statecraft. It consciously aligns itself with a new wave of Indian cinema that no longer feels compelled to dilute its national-security narratives by seeking external validation. By treating real national traumas like hijackings, terror networks and proxy wars, not as sensational triggers but as historical context, ‘Dhurandhar’ affirms a nation willing to confront its past and assert control over its security future.

The film would have benefited from a tighter edit - nearly 30 minutes could have been trimmed, reducing both excess length and gratuitous gore. Even so, ‘Dhurandhar’ remains a formidable, provocative work, earning a solid 3.5 out of 5. And I do look forward to the next instalment, releasing in March 2026.