I watched Dhurandhar: The Revenge across two evenings, which felt like the only honest way to absorb something that runs nearly four hours. By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t sure whether I had watched a spy thriller or survived one.
Aditya Dhar’s sequel to the 2025 original picks up where Hamza Ali Mazari left off, Ranveer Singh’s undercover RAW operative now deeper inside Karachi’s criminal networks, working through layers of gangland politics while avenging the 26/11 attacks and confronting the larger architecture of cross-border terror. The film does not ease you in gently. It assumes you remember the first film, assumes you are ready for what it is about to show you, and then shows you things that are genuinely difficult to shake. There is a sequence involving Uzair Baloch that I expect will stay with people long after they have forgotten the plot mechanics.
Critics have been split, and honestly, I understand both sides. Agnivo Niyogi in The Telegraph described it as having “more gore, more violence and brazen propaganda” and lacking the finesse of the first film. That is a fair observation. There are stretches where the film mistakes volume for momentum. Anuj Kumar in The Hindu wrote that it “roars, but in its deafening cocktail of patriotism and propaganda, it forgets the quiet cost of humanity.” I kept thinking about that line during the action sequences.
And yet the film has connected with audiences in a way that goes well beyond the usual box office math. It has grossed over ₹1,837 crore worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing Indian film of all time. That is not a number that comes from craft alone. Something else is happening here.
My own read on it: this film is doing for Indian audiences what cinema has always done in moments of unresolved national tension. It is providing a shape, a beginning and a middle and a definitive end, to something that real life has refused to resolve cleanly. The 26/11 attacks are not an abstraction for people who watched them unfold on television in their living rooms, in offices, in airports. They remain a wound that never fully closed, partly because the diplomatic and legal aftermath dragged on for years and produced nothing that felt like accountability. Dhurandhar: The Revenge offers that closure in fictional form, loudly and without apology.
I am not saying that excuses the propaganda elements or the runtime that could have used another pass in the editing room. Rishabh Suri in the Hindustan Times described it as “a roller-coaster thriller that may not match the first film’s precision but is elevated by Ranveer Singh’s powerful performance and a gripping second half,” and that feels like an accurate accounting of where the film succeeds and where it strains. But the emotional logic of why audiences are showing up in these numbers is not mysterious to me. The film is a pressure valve. It is big, it is brutal, and it gives people something they have been carrying for a very long time.
For those who want more, an uncut version titled Dhurandhar: The Revenge: Raw and Unseen is now streaming on Netflix in the US, featuring scenes that were cut from the theatrical release. Indian audiences can find it on JioHotstar, though the scenes cut by the Censor Board are not included in that version.
Whether the film deserves its place in the record books is a separate question from why it earned it. On the second question, at least, I think the answer is not hard to find.
