We wrote in December that Dhurandhar perfected Bollywood’s new formula: the fetishisation of Pakistan as the subcontinent’s most glamorous disaster. Dangerous, broken, desirable, and always in reach. Three months later, the world has changed more than the franchise has. Iran has seized the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan is psychologically vacating South Asia. And Dhurandhar 2 arrives as a cinematic relic of a paradigm already dissolving.
It is not good.
The first film worked because the villain was the gravitational centre. Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait, Baloch, charismatic, smouldering, made Ranveer Singh’s Hamza credible by giving him something worth the deception. A spy story lives or dies by its antagonist. Remove the antagonist, and you don’t get a hero. You get a man punching air for four hours. That is Dhurandhar 2. Angrier, louder, emptier; and at 3 hours 55 minutes, a film that confuses scale with depth.
The structural collapse is ideological as much as narrative. Dhurandhar 1 had grey. Hamza was a man genuinely lost between two worlds; the film understood that proximity to Pakistan produces desire, not only contempt. That complexity, that slippage between intimacy and danger, was what made it aesthetically serious. Dhurandhar 2 closes that gap entirely. The Pakistani Muslim is now simply a target, and the film is at pains to multiply them faster than they can be eliminated. This is the Hydra error; the same mistake Mossad has made in Gaza. Cut off the head and ten more appear, until the only logical conclusion the audience is being nudged toward is collective punishment. You cannot make a film that glorifies this logic and then claim it is merely entertainment.
The Hindutva-Zionism convergence is now visible at the level of cinematic grammar. Both traditions have arrived at the same endpoint: the innocents cannot be separated from the combatants, therefore the innocents must go too. It is a short distance from that premise to a football scene with a severed head, which Dhurandhar 2 includes without irony. This is not complexity. This is an audience being educated to hate, and that is far more dangerous than any amount of bad plotting.
Bollywood has always used Pakistan as its erotic shadow; familiar enough to feel intimate, foreign enough to feel forbidden. That formula depended on the Pakistani figure retaining some glamour, some interiority, some capacity to make the Indian hero sweat. Dhurandhar 2 strips all of that away. What remains is a shooting gallery. The irony is that by dehumanising its villains, the film also destroys its hero. Hamza becomes less interesting the more Pakistan becomes merely a backdrop for his competence.
The music, which in the first film gave us a Persian Gulf aesthetic that became genuinely anthemic, is a significant step down. The background score intrudes rather than elevates. And Ranveer Singh, who is a serious actor, is given a character arc built almost entirely around rage; which is a waste of an instrument that can do much more.
There is a deeper geopolitical irony the filmmakers did not intend. Dhurandhar 2 is a film about Indian dominance of the AfPak axis at precisely the moment that axis is reorienting toward Iran. Pakistan is stepping into its role as a Muslim power, mediating with Tehran, psychologically decoupling from the subcontinent. The Baloch and Pashtuns are the eastern Iranians; Punjab’s future is as a lowland frontier of a broader Persianate world, not as the last redoubt of a subcontinent fixation. Dhurandhar 2 is the cinematic expression of an India that has not yet noticed.
What Dhurandhar 1 understood, and Dhurandhar 2 has forgotten, is that the most dangerous person in any room is the one you cannot stop watching. Rehman Dakait was that person. His absence is not a plot problem. It is the film’s entire problem.
The sequels that matter are the ones that deepen what came before. Dhurandhar 2 only amplifies it, and amplification without depth is just noise.
ā ļø SPOILERS BELOW – Read only if you have seen the film
The demonetisation twist, a terrorist financing scheme triggering a sudden, state-sanctioned economic reset, is the film’s most politically revealing moment, and not in the way the filmmakers intended. It essentially retrofits the 2016 demonetisation as a counterterrorism masterstroke, a decision that in reality caused enormous economic suffering to India’s poor and informal sector. The film asks you to cheer for it. That is not dramaturgy. That is revisionist propaganda with a box office budget.
More damaging is what the origin story reveals about the film’s emotional architecture. Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s tragedy, the violence that breaks his early life and sets him on the path to becoming Hamza Ali Mazari, an undercover operative in Karachi, has essentially nothing to do with Pakistan. It is a private wound, domestic in origin, with no organic connection to the enemy he is sent to destroy. The state takes a broken man, gives his grief a direction, and the film celebrates this as heroism rather than examining it as manipulation. The hatred is not earned. It is installed.
The wound is specifically Punjabi, specifically Sikh. Land disputes, family fracture, the particular violence of that soil; these are not Pakistani pathologies. They are subcontinental ones, shared across the border that Partition drew through the heart of one people. By routing this grief through an anti-Pakistan narrative, the film asks Hamza to deny his Sikhness in order to become fully Indian, and frames that erasure as redemption. The drug crisis visited on his community is similarly offloaded onto Pakistan, which is a convenient half-truth. Punjab’s narcotics catastrophe has structural roots on both sides of the border, and anyone with intellectual honesty knows this. Bollywood can mythologise whatever it likes. But the Sikh-Pakistan connection, the shared Punjabi civilisational memory, the Gurdwaras, the kinship that Partition could not fully sever, deserved better than to be cast as contamination. A film confident enough in its own thesis would not need to launder its hero’s origins so aggressively. The broader tragedy is that a more honest treatment would have made Dhurandhar 2 a genuinely great film;Ā one that grappled with the real complexity of what Punjab is, what Sikhs carry, and what it costs a man to bury all of that under a cover identity and a foreign name.
This is the most honest thing Dhurandhar 2 accidentally says about itself. The entire revenge architecture, the premise of the franchise, rests on a motivation that was manufactured. Hamza is not a man who hates Pakistan because Pakistan wronged him. He is a man who was handed a target for a wound that predates it. The film does not interrogate this. It has no interest in doing so.
Hamza’s final identity crisis, does he belong to India or to the Karachi streets that made him, is the one genuinely interesting thread in the film, and it is dispatched in roughly eight minutes of screen time. This was the emotional centre waiting to be excavated. A man who became so fluent in another civilisation that he can no longer fully return to his own is a serious subject. Dhurandhar 3, if it comes, will need to live here. Dhurandhar 2 only glances at it on the way out.
Even I thought the same about the villain but later realized why the director ānerfedā Major Iqbal and made him look like an idiot along with the father.
He didnāt want Pakistanis adapting him as an icon.
Also this movie is the victory stretch for the first movieās setup.
Just like in cricket where India invested much in its systems so that Pakistan can be swatted away without any trouble in the current day.
Also the beheading of Arshad Pappu happened in real life as well as all the deaths (including the unknown gunmen kills).
This movie doesnāt really care about Afghanistan/Iran. Its entire purpose is about showing the India centric terror network.
A movie about Afghanistan/Iran is Pakistanās to make.
āThe entire revenge architecture, the premise of the franchise, rests on a motivation that was manufactured. Hamza is not a man who hates Pakistan because Pakistan wronged him. He is a man who was handed a target for a wound that predates it. The film does not interrogate this. It has no interest in doing so.ā
This is wrong. It was interrogated in both the films.
He openly says at the tea shop he was only interested in doing a few years and then returning to India somehow. It was 26/11 that makes him hate Pakistan and when Pakistan wronged him.
Aalam gives him the list of targets on the bridge that day. Before that he had no interest in assassinating anyone and simply passed information about possible attacks and currency plates. Thatās why the second part is called The Revenge.
Even Rahman was not a target initially. He gets added only on the day of the wedding to prevent a second attack. And in the final fight with Rehman, it is the memory of 26/11 that gives him the boost.
Also another hidden detail. 26/11 was his birthday (It can be seen on the passport) so that adds even greater significance.
I think an issue with a lot of people is that they are taking this film as a standalone film instead of seeing it as the second part of a long 7 hour movie. When you see it in that context, everything flows better. It was initially meant to be a single movie.
I think the best experience would be rewatching both films back to back and that is when you see all the details.
To add to this:
Jaskiratās mother was also getting 30000 a month. For him it was merely a job where he escaped the death sentence and was providing for his family. He didnāt particularly care for Pakistan either way.
He was doing his job as a spy but it was a job.
26/11 was when it became more than a job.
āThe Pakistani Muslim is now simply a target, and the film is at pains to multiply them faster than they can be eliminated.ā
āIt is a short distance from that premise to a football scene with a severed head, which Dhurandhar 2 includes without irony.ā
Disagree with these points too.
Except Dawood, all of the deaths happened on the exact dates they are shown.
Uzair beheaded Pappu and played football with his head.
Later on he was convicted for spying for India.
Aslam died via a car bomb.
Rehman died in an encounter with Aslam.
Khanani did fall off the building.
There is no multiplying targets faster. Each and every one of the unknown gunmen targets died in the manner that was shown.
This has been confirmed by Pakistanis themselves.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/indian-government-assassination-allegations-pakistan-intelligence-officials