Dhurandhar: The Revenge

Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar The Revenge opens with the origin story that was promised. Before dreaded Pakistani gangster—and undercover Indian spy—Hamza Ali Mazari, there was army officer Jaskirat Singh Rangi. In the year 2000, we see a younger Jaskirat (a tremendous Ranveer Singh) buying guns before singlehandedly storming a beastly stronghold in his hometown of Pathankot, maiming and tearing through every man he comes across in search of a family member held captive.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge arrives with unprecedented hype, accompanied by chatter about it creating and breaking new box office records. However, such numbers are not always indicative of a film’s merit—many good films often pass by without making a mark at the box office.

Quite early into Dhurandhar’s sequel Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the turbopop spy thriller from premier propaganda artist Aditya Dhar, R Madhavan’s Ajay Sanyal mentions the word mard. He says to Ranveer Singh’s Jaskirat, a wounded young man whose fate misled him to criminality over serving the nation in its army—before his recruitment as Indian agent Hamza Ali Mazari in Pakistan—”hum mard hain humara kartvaya hai ladna”. We are men, our duty is to fight. No other quote encapsulates the blood-soaked adrenaline driven contemporary cinema of the mainstream in India. Some of the biggest film industries in the country—Hindi, Tamil, Telugu—are all prey to the idea, and in the era of pan Indian cinema that sucks joy and jettisons emotion for violence, the one-man army—the titular mard—is the last remaining hero. The slipshod masculinity is its backbone and Dhar’s Dhurandhar films double down with gusto.

Of all the possible callbacks to Dhurandhar, there was one scene that was always going to be revisited in the sequel. At the start of the first film, Intelligence Bureau chief Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan) negotiates with Pakistani hijackers. Their leader, Zahoor (Vivek Sinha), mocks his attempt to get the passengers to complete his cry of ‘Bharat mata ki…’ and tells him that Hindus are a cowardly race. In the sequel, Sanyal speaks to Zahoor again, on video call, after Indian spy Hamza (Ranveer Singh) has beaten him bloody and is pointing a revolver at him. Sanyal gloats a bit, then asks him to complete the slogan he couldn’t all those years ago. This is Aditya Dhar’s cinema in a nutshell: Bharat mata ki jai, down the barrel of a gun.

For a second time in two months, a woman disapproves of her gangster-husband betraying her nation. It happened recently in Vishal Bhardwaj’s O’Romeo, when Rabia (Tamannah Bhatia) confronts Jalal (Avinash Tiwary; a stand-in for Dawood Ibrahim) for allying with the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI. In Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar: The Revenge, Yalina (Sara Arjun) aims a glock at Hamza (Ranveer Singh) when she finds his secret diary with names of targets — all of them said to be embroiled in terror attacks in India.

Great filmmakers tend to tell the same story in different ways and weak ones find different ways to say little. Aditya Dhar, who is neither, presents a unique reality of telling all stories in the same way. This can sound alarmist given that he has directed only three features and two are parts of the same film. But the sameness exists, running deeper than aesthetics and assuming more stealth than superficial plot twists. Dhurandhar: The Revenge reinforces it with fuller might, revealing in the process the merit and limitations of his work.

It isn’t as if the people responsible for the action set-pieces haven’t gone all out in this one, with bombs and guns blasting away, jeeps careering around vast stretches of sand, men — as ever, scant place for women in this all-male ensemble – swarming everywhere, stabbing, shooting, killing. But except for a couple of sequences, where the adrenaline gets pumping, the rest is pretty ho-hum: imagine a character actually saying ‘we don’t have problems with Pakistan as such, only those Pakistanis who are terrorists’ or words to that effect. Haww, whatever happened to all that Islamophobia? The poor ISI chap is the only one left spouting anti-India sentiments, the rest are content to blow each other up. And that vaunted inclusion of ‘Bada Sahab’, standing in for the dreaded Dawood Ibrahim, is a bit of a bore: sometimes, the more hype, the more the expectation, the more of a let-down it is.

Three months after writer-director Aditya Dhar set the box office ablaze with Dhurandhar, he brings another, longer round of his violent saga. This time, there’s a sharp political manifesto attached. Yes, Pakistan is India’s favourite worst enemy, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a key character here, even if it means showing him through videos of his speeches playing in the background. Referred to as “chaiwala” by the villains, his decisions cause as much headache in Pakistan as Hamza’s actions do.