Dhurandhar Movie Review: A Gripping Thriller?

The premise is lean, almost mythic. Hamza Ali Mazari (Ranveer Singh), a man of few words and devastating precision, arrives in Karachi with a ghost’s past. He ingratiates himself with the city’s underworld, working under the drug lord Rehman Dakait (Akshaye Khanna, in a masterclass of coiled menace). But Hamza is not merely climbing the criminal ladder. He is a blade honed by India’s intelligence apparatus - specifically, by the weary veteran Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan) and the hawkish Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal). His target isn’t just the underworld; it is the symbiotic nexus where the ISI, drug money, and terror planning converge. As Hamza rises, he must tear apart the very system that protects Dakait, while protecting a photojournalist, Yalina Jamali (Sara Arjun), who holds the key to exposing the rot. The journey is one of methodical violence, double-crosses, and a descent into a darkness that threatens to consume Hamza himself.

Director Aditya Dhar, fresh off his own Uri legacy, has not made a conventional Bollywood film. He has made a 3.5-hour, high-caliber siege on your attention span. The first hour is a slow-burn masterclass of world-building. We watch Hamza endure brutal hazing, prove his worth in a concrete warehouse fight that runs for an uninterrupted twelve minutes, and slowly earn the paranoid trust of Dakait. Singh is extraordinary here; he modulates between a dead-eyed, blank-slate killer and a man whose eyes flicker with the trauma of his orders. His dual role - he also plays the Kashmiri-agent Jaskirat Singh Rangi in sporadic flashbacks - adds a layer of thematic schizophrenia, the actor literally splitting to embody the cost of a double life.

The film’s crown jewel is Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait. His voice is a whisper, his laughter a cold ripple. In a scene where he explains the economics of the narcotics-terror pipeline while casually eating a mango, the spoon becomes a weapon of dialogue delivery. Madhavan, as the handler Sanyal, provides the film’s moral center, a man drowning in bureaucratic guilt. Arjun Rampal’s Major Iqbal is lean, ferocious, and harbors no doubts - he is the id to Sanyal’s superego. Sanjay Dutt, as the incorruptible SP Chaudhary Aslam, brings a weary gravitas that grounds the chaos. Even Rakesh Bedi, cast against type as a fearful informant, delivers a gut-punch of a performance in his final scene.

But Dhurandhar is relentless. Dhar and his cinematographer Mir Sawai (who shot Mukkabaaz and Kai Po Che!) use a claustrophobic lens: narrow alleys, sweat-slicked faces, fluorescent-lit safe houses. The action is brutally realistic - no wire-fu, no CGI explosions that look like video games. A car chase through the narrow streets of Lyari is a masterpiece of tension, shot at ground level with debris and fear filling the frame. The film’s biggest problem, and it is a significant one, is its runtime. The third act, where Hamza must escape and tie up loose ends, drags through two separate but similar betrayal sequences. A subplot involving a sleeper cell in Dubai could have been excised entirely, removing 25 minutes without damaging the core narrative.

Furthermore, the film’s politics are uncompromisingly stark. It paints the ISI-Underworld nexus as a single, hydra-headed monster. There are no shades of gray given to the antagonists - they are presented as pragmatic, monstrous, and utterly without redemption. This clarity is a strength in action but a limitation in depth. Some may find the film’s unflinching jingoism (though not overtly jingoistic in dialogue; it’s felt in the mission’s purity) to be simplistic. But for a movie that shows a man losing his soul to save his nation, maybe the villains are meant to be that dark.

Pros

• Ranveer Singh delivers a career-best, physically and emotionally demanding performance.
• Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait is one of the most chilling antagonists in modern Hindi cinema.
• Aditya Dhar’s direction is assured, with impeccable staging of action and tension.
• The sound design and background score (an uncredited mix of traditional Sindhi instruments and electronic drones) is immersive and unnerving.
• The final 40-minute raid sequence is a technical tour de force, combining tactical realism with emotional stakes.

Cons

• The 214-minute runtime is undeniably bloated; the Dubai subplot and a redundant monologue in the third act sap momentum.
• The female roles (Sara Arjun’s Yalina, in particular) are underwritten, serving mostly as plot devices.
• The film’s relentless pessimism can be exhausting; there are very few moments of levity or hope.
• The sound mixing in the first 20 minutes is aggressively loud, with dialogue occasionally buried beneath the score.

Dhurandhar is not a film you watch; it is a film you endure. It demands patience, rewards it with shattering peaks, and frustrates with occasional valleys of indulgence. But to call it merely "good" is to miss the point. This is a filmmaker operating at the peak of his craft, an actor shedding his star skin to become a tool of narrative, and a story that refuses to blink. For those with the stamina, it is a rare, brutal masterpiece. For everyone else, wait for the inevitable, tighter director’s cut.