Exciting and repulsive, Aditya Dhar’s star-studded gangster epic Dhurandhar (“Stalwart”) is the latest in Bollywood’s recent wave of jingoistic action films skirting the line of Islamophobic propaganda. Yet it stands apart from its peers by being not just adequate, but at times brilliant – perhaps that’s what makes it dangerous – resulting in a three-and-a-half hour spy odyssey with enough blood, torture, and butchered limbs to put a Saw movie to shame. It’s ugly and enthralling in equal measure.
Touting itself as “inspired by incredible true events” (a claim that stretches credulity), Dhurandhar follows an Indian military operative who goes deep undercover in Pakistan in the mid-2000s, adopting the name Hamza Ali Mazari (a stoic, lion-maned Ranveer Singh). Working his way up from a juice stall through Karachi’s communal politics, he embeds himself within a local mafia network with ties to both national parties and international terrorism, transforming this espionage saga into one of vicious, bone-crunching action, and complicated emotional loyalties. On the flipside, this grand character opera leaves very little room for actual spycraft. Boo! Hiss!
As the years go by, Hamza grows more attached to his targets. However, it soon becomes clear – to the audience, if not to the conflicted anti-hero – that his cohorts are setting the stage for a real-world 2008 terror attack in Mumbai. Until now, these events have never been the subject of a remotely competent feature, whether it was Bollywood’s cartoonish The Attacks of 26/11 (2013), the French-Belgian snooze Taj Mahal (2015), or Hollywood’s sensationalistic Hotel Mumbai (2019). Dhurandhar might technically change that, though it invents some pretty tall tales of its own in the process.
However, its adjacency to reality also makes Dhurandhar a thorny prospect. Many of its characters are real people, like Akshaye Khanna’s intense Rehman Dakait, a Karachi gangster and family man who takes Hamza under his wing, and Sanjay Dutt’s Chaudhary Aslam, a revered Pakistani police officer taking on gangs and terror cells (portrayed here as a corrupt opportunist). Others are closely based on real people, like Arjun Rampal’s magnetic military operative Major Iqbal (based on real terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri) and R. Madhavan’s stern spymaster Ajay Sanyal, who sends Hamza on his way from India, and bears intentional resemblance to the country’s National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval. Hamza, however, has no known real-world equivalent; some connections have been rumored, but subsequently denied.
Dhurandhar is a three-and-a-half hour spy odyssey with enough blood, torture, and butchered limbs to put a Saw movie to shame.
This makes the movie’s premise, and its invocation of archival footage and phone recordings from various terror attacks, dubious at best. There are times when it plays like an evil twin to The Voice of Hind Rajab, the recent Venice drama that uses real phone calls to dramatize the IDF killing of a Palestinian child. By repeatedly yanking reality into its fictitious purview, Dhurandhar attempts to stir up the volatile emotions currently engulfing India’s political milieu when it comes to tensions with Pakistan, and its continued antagonization of Indian Muslims. Early lines of dialogue position Sanyal’s negotiations with terrorist hijackers as a battle to maintain a Hindu-centric national unity under attack from Islamic invaders. Similarly, key emotional beats see Hamza not only chancing upon known terrorists mid-call to prayer, but later, recalling their proclamations of “Allahu Akbar” when he’s beaten down, their Muslim-ness fueling his hatred and bringing him back to his feet like an Islamophobic Rocky. You’re unlikely to see another December release with such hostile nihilism coursing through its veins. Even its lone hint of optimism is secretly cynical – Sanyal’s anticipation of a more stringent anti-corruption government, which is practically a campaign banner for India’s current strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP, who would come to power in the years following the film’s events.
Still, Dhar’s commitment to craft is as undeniable as his capitulating to Hindutva politics. Hamza, although a reactionary revenge fantasy, is an alluring centerpiece in what turns out to be a mile-a-minute thriller in which he ping-pongs between major political players in an effort to rise through the ranks. As Hamza navigates Lyari, a Karachi neighborhood beset by ethnic tensions, the otherwise highly-animated Singh shows uncharacteristic emotional restraint, but moves through scenes with muscular momentum. He observes and schemes (and smolders) in plain sight en route to ferocious explosions while developing a genuine camaraderie with his mobster marks, and eventually, a predatory romance with Yalina (Sara Arjun), the much younger daughter of a political rival.
Another distinction between Dhurandhar and other works of its ilk, like Dhar’s own Zero Dark Thirty-esque Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), is that Hamza isn’t an unequivocal hero. He’s framed as a manipulative scumbag through and through, thanks in part to the way Dakait’s gang is humanized right down to the most minor henchmen, who are all pretty fun to be around. This ensures that Hamza’s eventual turn against them feels halfway between righteous vengeance and heinous betrayal. Khanna, a romantic lead from several decades ago, is especially charismatic as a father first and foremost, and an urban militant second; it’s a career-best role. The film is so dramatically fine-tuned that even when it ends on a cliffhanger, falling victim to the duology disease infecting both Indian and American blockbusters (Part 2 arrives March 19th), the result is less exasperation and more eager anticipation, with adrenaline that carries even through its mid-credits teaser.
Buoyed by contemporary Indian and Arabic hip-hop and upbeat remixes of Bollywood classics, Dhurandhar not only sees Dhar tap into his signature brutality, but allows him to imbue it with delirious exuberance born from repugnant moral impulses. If you can stomach the cognitive dissonance, it might be worth your while. People get stabbed, riddled with bullets, pressure-cooked, blown to bits, strung by meat-hooks, de-limbed, decapitated, dragged through the streets by motorcycle, have their skulls caved in, and meet pretty much every grisly outcome you can imagine, as cinematographer Vikash Nowlakha’s camera captures the mayhem at lightspeed, and editor Shivkumar V. Panicker cross-cuts between high melodrama and grounded barbarism as though they were sides to a rapidly spinning coin. The movie’s cool blue hues give it the appearance of perpetual twilight, as though the sun were constantly setting on Hamza, forcing him to shed his personal ethics in favor of a more abstract, nationalistic morality that permits any kind of violence or transgression if it translates into jaw-dropping, stylized action. It’s disturbingly good…in every sense of the phrase.
