DHURANDHAR: THE REVENGE
Has India Found Its Ultimate Spy Saga?
"Ghayal hoon, isliye ghatak hoon." Wounded. Therefore, deadly. And the second part earns every syllable of that line.
THE WOUND THAT WOULDN'T CLOSE
There is a particular kind of film that doesn't just entertain you — it inhabits you. You walk out of the theatre and the images follow you home, settle into your chest, and refuse to leave for days. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is that film. It is big, brutal, and sometimes bloated, but underneath all the gunpowder and geopolitical chess, there pulses something genuinely rare in Indian commercial cinema: a moral question without an easy answer.
What does it cost a man to become a ghost for his country? Not metaphorically — literally. To erase your name, your family, your language, your past. To live for years among people who would kill you if they ever knew your truth. To do terrible, irredeemable things in the service of a cause you can only witness from the shadows. Aditya Dhar's Dhurandhar duology asks this question across nearly eight hours of cinema, and The Revenge is where it finally, ferociously, demands an answer.
"The first part built the world. The second part burns it down — and dares you to feel something in the ashes."
— On Dhurandhar: The RevengeReleased on March 19, 2026, following the blockbuster Dhurandhar (December 2025) — the second-highest-grossing Hindi film of 2025 — this sequel arrived with the weight of extraordinary expectation. Ranveer Singh, who spent the first film lurking at the edges of Akshaye Khanna's volcanic performance, finally steps fully into the light. What he delivers is the performance of his career — and arguably one of the finest spy-film turns in Indian cinema history.
Let's go deep. Because this film deserves more than a rating and a recommendation. It deserves to be understood.
BEFORE THE REVENGE: UNDERSTANDING DHURANDHAR PART 1
To understand Dhurandhar: The Revenge, you must first understand the foundation Aditya Dhar laid with meticulous, almost obsessive care in the first instalment.
The story begins after two seismic national traumas: the hijacking of IC-814 in 1999 and the 2001 Indian Parliament attack. The Intelligence Bureau's chief, Ajay Sanyal — a barely fictionalised Ajit Doval, played with ice-blooded precision by R. Madhavan — devises a mission of extraordinary audacity. The objective: infiltrate Karachi's Lyari underworld, the lawless neighbourhood that functions as a hub for terrorism financing, and dismantle the ISI-underworld nexus from within.
The instrument chosen for this mission is Jaskirat Singh Rangi (Ranveer Singh) — a 20-year-old Punjabi boy from Pathankot who, in a moment of violent love for his sister, killed the men who abducted her. Arrested and facing murder charges, he is identified from a prison van during transport. Sanyal sees something in this wounded young man: ferocity without fear, and a capacity for violence disciplined by love. The line "Ghayal hoon, isliye ghatak hoon" — You are wounded, therefore you are deadly — becomes the philosophical spine of everything that follows.
As Hamza Ali Mazari, Jaskirat infiltrates the Karachi underworld and begins his slow, dangerous climb through the ranks of Rehman Dakait's criminal empire. Akshaye Khanna's Rehman is the beating heart of Part 1 — a villain of Shakespearean complexity, charming and monstrous in equal measure, a gangster whose political ambitions make him genuinely dangerous to national security. The first film ends with Rehman's death — and the audience left with a post-credits scene that promised something even darker was coming.
Dhurandhar (Part 1) ran for 214 minutes and was shot across Thailand, Punjab, Mumbai, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh. It ranks as the 15th highest-grossing Indian film of all time and was the second-highest-grossing Hindi film of 2025. The combined earnings of both films exceeded ₹3,000 crore worldwide.
THE DHURANDHAR REVENGE STORYLINE: WHAT THIS FILM IS REALLY ABOUT
The Dhurandhar revenge storyline picks up exactly where Part 1 left off, in the immediate aftermath of Rehman Dakait's fall. Lyari — already a powder keg — detonates into a vicious power vacuum. Umar Baloch (Danish Pandor), Rehman's brother, seeks revenge and tries to seize control. Arshad Pappu (Ashwin Dhar), the Pathan faction leader, has his own designs. And at the centre of this gathering storm stands Hamza — who manipulates both sides with the cold-blooded efficiency of a chess grandmaster.
But this is not just a story about power politics. The Dhurandhar second part introduces the film's true antagonist: Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), an ISI operative whose character is based on Pakistani terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri. Major Iqbal is unlike Rehman Dakait. Where Rehman was a creature of the street — visceral, unpredictable, weirdly human — Iqbal is a soldier of ideology. Coldly institutional. The kind of man who can order atrocities without breaking stride, whose hatred for India is not personal but doctrinal. He represents the machinery, not the man, which makes him terrifying in a different register entirely.
The Personal Thread: What Makes Jaskirat Fight
The film's emotional intelligence lies in understanding that revenge, for Jaskirat, operates on two levels simultaneously. There is the geopolitical mission — dismantling terror networks linked to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, cutting off financing routes, eliminating figures like Atiq Ahmed (whose point-blank killing, referencing a real event, becomes one of the film's most chilling moments). And there is the deeply personal dimension: Jaskirat has been living a lie for years. He is a ghost — not quite Indian anymore, not Pakistani, belonging nowhere, loved by no one who knows his real name.
Sara Arjun plays Yalina, the woman who loves Hamza — not knowing who Jaskirat really is. Her scenes with Ranveer Singh are the film's quietest and most devastating. There is a moment where she looks at him with complete trust, and he looks back knowing he will eventually destroy that trust as collaterally as any bomb blast. The scene says nothing directly. It doesn't need to.
Hamza sits at a simple meal with Yalina. She talks about their future. He listens. Ranveer Singh does not play this with visible anguish — that would be too easy. Instead, he plays it with a specific, careful blankness, the face of a man who has trained himself not to feel things in real time because feeling things in real time is how spies get killed. Only his eyes betray him — a flicker of something that could be grief, or guilt, or simply exhaustion. It is one of the great understated moments in recent Indian cinema.
DHURANDHAR CAST: WHO DELIVERS AND WHO DOESN'T
Ranveer Singh: The Long-Awaited Arrival
The first film was, in a strange and deliberate way, Ranveer Singh playing second fiddle to Akshaye Khanna's thunderous Rehman. Critics noticed it — some found it disciplined and brilliant, others found it underwhelming. Part 2 erases that ambiguity entirely. This is Ranveer's film from frame one, and he responds to the weight of that responsibility with what can only be described as controlled devastation.
His action sequences — we'll detail them below — are spectacular. But his quieter moments are the revelation. Watch the scene where Hamza must maintain composure while learning of a tragedy connected to his mission. Ranveer holds the emotion in his jaw, in the set of his shoulders, letting the audience feel the pressure of a man who cannot crack, because cracking means death. This is not the flamboyant Ranveer of Padmaavat or Gully Boy. This is something harder, more interior, more dangerous.
Arjun Rampal: The Dhurandhar Villain Who Chills Without Theatrics
After Akshaye Khanna's operatic villainy in Part 1, following up with another memorable antagonist was the film's most delicate challenge. Arjun Rampal's Major Iqbal answers that challenge not by competing with Khanna but by being his exact opposite. Where Rehman Dakait was fire, Iqbal is ice. Rampal plays him with bureaucratic menace — clipped, controlled, his violence always institutional, always purposeful. His introduction scene, where he walks through the aftermath of an attack he ordered without once raising his voice, establishes him immediately as someone who has long since stopped finding death interesting.
The father-son dynamic with his disabled, mocking father (Brigadier Jahangir) gives Iqbal an unexpected interior life — shades of the Bhallaladeva-Bijjaladeva relationship from Baahubali — though this thread is underwritten and feels borrowed rather than earned. Nevertheless, Rampal's physical presence and contained menace make the final confrontation feel genuinely earned.
R. Madhavan: The Invisible Hand That Moves Everything
If Ranveer is the sword, Madhavan's Ajay Sanyal is the intelligence behind the hand that wields it. He brings a particular kind of stillness to the role — a man who thinks three moves ahead, always. His most powerful moments come in the third act, when the human cost of his operation can no longer be abstracted into strategy. The phone call he makes to the Pakistani ISI chief — cold, coercive, precise — is one of the film's great dialogue scenes, even if it tips slightly toward the cinematic rather than the real.
The Akshaye Khanna problem: The film's most honest weakness is that it never quite fills the void left by Rehman Dakait. Akshaye Khanna's performance was so deeply specific, so alive, that the film still feels his absence in its second half. Arjun Rampal is excellent — but Iqbal is a function, where Rehman was a person.
DHURANDHAR ACTION SCENES: VISCERAL, VIOLENT, UNFORGETTABLE
Let's be blunt: the action in Dhurandhar: The Revenge is among the finest choreographed in Indian cinema. This is not the sanitised, wire-assisted spectacle of mainstream Bollywood action. Aditya Dhar goes for grit, for consequence, for the visual grammar of a film that understands violence has weight — physical and moral.
The Lyari Power Struggle Sequence
Early in the film, as Lyari erupts following Rehman's death, there is a sequence that spans nearly twelve minutes of controlled chaos. It's shot in tight corridors and narrow alleys — cinematographer Vikash Nowlakha keeps the camera intimate, breathing, almost suffocating. You feel the walls closing in. The editing is surgical in its clarity: you always know where Hamza is in relation to danger, which means when danger closes in, the fear is real and earned.
The Atiq Ahmed Confrontation
One of the film's most audacious choices is its handling of Atiq Ahmed — a real political figure whose point-blank killing was broadcast live on Indian news. The film incorporates this event into its narrative, framing it as part of the wider intelligence operation. The sequence is brief, merciless, and historically charged. It will make some audiences deeply uncomfortable — which is exactly the point. Dhar trusts his audience enough to not editorialize.
The Muridke Assault: Where the Film Earns Its Title
The third-act assault on a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Muridke is the film's centrepiece action sequence. It is massive in scale — almost Rohit Shetty-level in its kinetic ambition — but grounded by the personal stakes of every character involved. Hamza fighting his way through the camp, surrounded by Baloch fighters who trust him, knowing the entire operation could collapse if one person identifies him, is extraordinary tension filmmaking. The sequence culminates in his capture — and what follows next is the film's most emotionally devastating passage.
The climactic physical confrontation between Jaskirat and Major Iqbal is the kind of fight sequence that Indian cinema rarely attempts with this kind of psychological architecture. It is not just two men hitting each other. It is the collision of two worldviews — duty without humanity versus ideology without conscience. Ranveer Singh is visibly exhausted, bloodied, operating on something beyond physical capacity. Arjun Rampal fights with the precision of a military man. Some critics have called the sequence too long. They are wrong. The length is the point — this kind of wound takes time to close.
DHURANDHAR EMOTIONAL SCENES: WHERE THE FILM TRULY LIVES
The spy genre often traffics in cool — in the aesthetic distance of the professional killer. What makes the Dhurandhar films genuinely unusual is their insistence on heat. On the cost. On the human beings behind the mission files.
The Sacrifice That Is Never Celebrated
The film's most emotionally complex idea — executed with restraint rather than melodrama — is the notion of "balidaan" (sacrifice) as something invisible. Jaskirat Singh Rangi will never be publicly celebrated. He cannot be. He is, by design, a ghost. There will be no medal ceremony, no acknowledgement, no homecoming. The country he bled for will never know his name. This is presented not as tragedy but as calling — and somehow that restraint makes it more heartbreaking than any orchestrated weeping scene could manage.
The Torture Sequence
After his cover is blown at the Muridke camp, Hamza is captured and tortured. This sequence is not easy to watch. It is not meant to be. The camera doesn't look away — but neither does it fetishize. Ranveer Singh's performance in these minutes is devastating. What he conveys is not just physical pain but a very specific spiritual desolation: the moment when a man wonders whether the thing he sacrificed everything for was worth the price.
"Some films ask whether the ends justify the means. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is honest enough to never fully answer that question — and wise enough to know the asking is what matters."
The Final Goodbye That Isn't
Near the film's end, there is a moment — wordless, almost accidental — where Jaskirat briefly, impossibly, glimpses the India he can never return to. It is not staged as a grand emotional crescendo. It is quiet and private and absolutely shattering. Aditya Dhar earns this moment because he has not been manipulating us emotionally for nearly four hours — he has been demanding that we feel the true weight of what this man gave up.
THE DHURANDHAR VILLAIN: MAJOR IQBAL AND THE MACHINERY OF MALICE
Great spy thrillers require great antagonists, and Major Iqbal is a fascinatingly different beast from Rehman Dakait. Inspired by Ilyas Kashmiri — a real Pakistani militant who was reportedly killed in a drone strike in 2011 — Iqbal represents the ideological infrastructure of terror rather than its street-level violence.
His introduction is deliberately clinical. He arrives not with a musical sting but in the middle of a bureaucratic meeting, delivering cold strategic judgments. You understand immediately that this is a man for whom individual lives are variables, not people. His brutality is procedural. And Arjun Rampal, to his enormous credit, does not play this as cartoonish evil — he plays it as conviction. Iqbal believes. That is what makes him monstrous.
The father-son subplot, while somewhat derivative, does give Iqbal a psychological wound to operate from. His father's contempt has shaped his need to prove himself, which explains his ideological rigidity — he cannot afford doubt because doubt would confirm his father's assessment of him. It's a compact but effective piece of character construction.
What the film gets most right about its Dhurandhar villain is refusing to give him a redemption arc. Iqbal does not waver, does not question, does not soften. He is defeated — not converted. This feels true to the story being told.
DHURANDHAR REVENGE CLIMAX: THE ENDING EXPLAINED
The Dhurandhar climax is, by any measure, the film's greatest achievement — and also its most discussed element. It has provoked extended conversations online, in tea shops, in office corridors across India, which is the highest compliment you can pay a mainstream film's conclusion.
The Muridke Endgame
The final act shifts to the assault on the Lashkar-e-Taiba camp at Muridke — a location loaded with real historical significance, as it is the site of the training camp linked to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Hamza, working with Baloch rebel allies, leads the assault. The operation succeeds — the terror infrastructure is dismantled, the financing networks cut — but at enormous personal cost. His cover is blown. He is captured. He is tortured.
The Twist: Jameel Jamali
The film's biggest narrative surprise involves Rakesh Bedi's Jameel Jamali — a Pakistani politician who has been a recurring background presence throughout both films. In the climax, he is revealed to have been an Indian intelligence asset all along, providing the leverage needed for Ajay Sanyal to coerce a senior Pakistani official into orchestrating Hamza's extraction. Bedi, whose comic-character energy has provided some of the film's lighter moments, plays this revelation with a masterclass in understated revelation. It recontextualises every scene he has appeared in — and rewards attentive viewers from Part 1.
Hamza survives. Badly injured, psychologically shattered, he is extracted from Pakistani territory — but to where? He cannot return to India as Jaskirat Singh Rangi. That identity is effectively dead. He cannot stay in Pakistan as Hamza Ali Mazari. The film's final choice is quietly radical: it refuses to give him a clean resolution. He is alive. He is free. But he is still, and perhaps permanently, a man without a country. The final image — Jaskirat looking at something out of frame, his expression unreadable — is cinema at its most honest. The screen cuts to black, and Shashwat Sachdev's score swell is the only explanation offered. None is needed.
Post-Credits: What It Signals
Though Dhar confirmed this is a duology, the post-credits content (as with Part 1) suggests the world of Dhurandhar has more stories to tell. Whether as a franchise continuation or a standalone future project, the Dhurandhar universe feels fully realized enough to sustain further exploration.
CINEMATOGRAPHY, MUSIC & TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE
Vikash Nowlakha's Camera: Karachi as Character
The Dhurandhar movie series has the most convincingly realized Karachi in Indian cinema — and that is almost entirely Vikash Nowlakha's achievement. He photographs Lyari not as an exotic threat but as a living, breathing neighbourhood — chaotic, human, beautiful in its grime. The colour palette shifts across the film: warm amber for the underworld sequences, harsh white for the intelligence briefings, desaturated blue-grey for the torture and capture passages. Every visual choice is a narrative choice.
Shashwat Sachdev's Score: Music That Breathes With the Film
Sachdev composed one of 2025's most acclaimed scores for Part 1, and he outdoes himself in The Revenge. The background score is the film's secret weapon — its layering of Punjabi folk motifs with electronic percussion and traditional Pakistani musical textures creates a sound that is aurally specific to no single nationality, which mirrors Hamza's identity perfectly. The theme that plays in the climax — a slow, aching variation of the film's main motif — is the kind of music that makes the images hurt more than they would without it.
Songs from Part 1 — "Faisla," "Didi Wa," even the unlikely "Rasputin" — return only as background elements rather than full performance sequences. This is the right call. In the context of The Revenge's darker emotional register, a dance number would feel obscene.
Editing: Mostly Sharp, Occasionally Indulgent
Shivkumar V. Panicker's editing is largely excellent — the film's 235-minute runtime moves with more urgency than Part 1's 214 minutes, which is a genuine achievement. The interweaving of timelines (Jaskirat's backstory, the present mission, Sanyal's strategic overview) is handled with clarity. The Ranveer-Arjun Rampal finale does outstay its welcome slightly — a tightening of roughly eight to ten minutes would make it devastating rather than impressive. This is the film's most honest technical criticism.
The rolling credits are not something to escape. Sachdev fills them with material that rewards viewers who stay — and reveals, in the final moments, a piece of musical resolution that ties the entire duology's emotional arc together. If you leave before the lights come up, you will miss something genuinely beautiful.
DIALOGUE, SCREENPLAY & DHURANDHAR STORY EXPLAINED
Aditya Dhar's screenplay for Part 2 is structurally more confident than Part 1 — perhaps because the world-building is complete and he can finally focus on character. The Dhurandhar story in this instalment is less a conventional narrative than, as one critic aptly noted, "an experience" — it moves associatively, through atmosphere and consequence rather than plot mechanics.
The dialogue is a genuine strength. Where Sanjay Dutt's SP Aslam was occasionally given profanity-laden lines in Part 1 for colour, here his dialogue has more bite and purpose — his coarseness now feels like a characterological choice rather than a comic relief valve. R. Madhavan's Sanyal speaks in the specific cadences of institutional power: clipped, unornamental, always precise. The contrast with Ranveer's Hamza — who must switch between Punjabi warmth, Urdu street fluency, and the silence of someone who has learned to speak only when necessary — is quietly impressive.
The film's weakest dialogue moment is the ISI chief phone call in the third act, which tips into the kind of pointed confrontation that sounds like a line-for-line political speech rather than a real conversation. It is the one scene where Dhar's instinct for authenticity deserts him in favour of crowd-pleasing clarity.
The incorporation of real events — demonetisation's effect on cross-border terror financing, the 26/11 attacks, Dawood Ibrahim's deteriorating health — is handled with varying success. The demonetisation angle is genuinely interesting; the Dawood Ibrahim appearance feels more cinematic novelty than narrative necessity.
SYMBOLISM & HIDDEN MEANINGS IN DHURANDHAR: THE REVENGE
Dhar is not a filmmaker who loads his work with obscure symbolism, but there are recurring images in The Revenge that reward attention.
- Water: Jaskirat's earliest memory shown in the film involves water — the river near his Pathankot village. Water recurs in moments of psychological extremity, functioning as a kind of call back to the self he abandoned. In the torture sequence, water is both weapon and the image he escapes to mentally.
- Mirrors: Hamza avoids mirrors throughout the film — a detail so subtle it reads as set dressing until the final act reveals its significance. The one time he looks directly at his own reflection, the film cuts away before we can see his expression.
- The Turban: Jaskirat wore a turban as his Punjabi self. Hamza never does. In the film's final images, a piece of saffron fabric — the colour of a Punjabi turban — is the last visual before the cut to black. It is the film's most delicate and final emotional gesture.
- The Phrase "Ghayal": "Wounded" in Hindi. The word appears in dialogue five times across the film, always in different contexts — sometimes as a statement of strategy, once as a question, once, devastatingly, as something close to a confession.
STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES: AN HONEST ANALYSIS
| Aspect | Assessment | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Ranveer Singh's performance | Career-best. Controlled, interior, devastating. | Exceptional |
| Climax (final 45 minutes) | One of the best climax sequences in recent Indian cinema. | Outstanding |
| Arjun Rampal as villain | Cold and effective, though can't match Akshaye Khanna's volcanic charisma. | Strong |
| Background score | Shashwat Sachdev delivers a masterclass. | Exceptional |
| Cinematography | Vikash Nowlakha's Karachi is alive and textured. | Outstanding |
| Emotional depth | The sacrifice narrative lands with honesty and restraint. | Strong |
| Final fight sequence length | 8–10 minutes too long; slightly repetitive. | Minor flaw |
| Replacing Akshaye Khanna's energy | Impossible task; the film never fully plugs the gap. | Visible gap |
| Dialogue (select scenes) | Some lines tip toward political speechmaking. | Occasional |
| Extreme violence | Some sequences cross into discomfort without narrative payoff. | Debatable |
HOW IT COMPARES: DHURANDHAR IN THE LANDSCAPE OF REVENGE-SPY CINEMA
Every major Indian spy film of the last decade has drawn comparisons to the template set by Aditya Dhar's own Uri: The Surgical Strike. The Dhurandhar movie is a conscious evolution — more complex morally, more ambiguous emotionally, less interested in clean catharsis and more interested in lasting questions.
Uri was a precision strike — lean, muscular, emotionally direct. Dhurandhar is a decade-long siege — sprawling, morally complex, more interested in the cost than the victory. Both are essential. They are different films asking different questions.
Raazi remains the gold standard for the human cost of undercover espionage in Indian cinema. Dhurandhar shares its thematic DNA but operates at ten times the scale. Meghna Gulzar's film is interior; Dhar's is epic. Both are right.
Pathaan is entertainment as national event. Dhurandhar uses similar patriotic energy but grafts it onto something genuinely grim and morally demanding. The two films are not competitors; they represent different missions entirely.
Both films ask: what does a person sacrifice, and what does society sacrifice, to protect itself? Dhurandhar doesn't reach Nolan's philosophical density — but it asks the question, which puts it in rare company among mainstream action films anywhere in the world.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
FINAL VERDICT: DOES DHURANDHAR: THE REVENGE DELIVER?
Here is the honest answer: yes. Not perfectly — nothing this ambitious could be — but yes, emphatically and memorably. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is the rare sequel that justifies the investment of the first film and then demands its own evaluation on its own terms.
It is a film about the price of patriotism, told without the comfort of simplicity. It asks you to admire a man doing terrible things for beautiful reasons, and it never lets you off the hook by pretending those terrible things are cost-free. In a landscape of mainstream Indian cinema that too often wants its cake and the moral clarity to eat it too, this is genuinely rare.
Ranveer Singh has found his Hamlet. Aditya Dhar has made, across these two films, the most ambitious spy saga in Indian cinema's history. Shashwat Sachdev has composed two consecutive masterclasses. Vikash Nowlakha has made Karachi unforgettable. And somewhere in the final image — that saffron fabric, that cut to black — the film achieves something that most films never do: it makes you feel the silence after the story ends.
See it. Then go back and watch Part 1 again. The dots you will connect will break your heart in the best possible way.
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