Dhurandhar: The Revenge Isn't Propaganda. It's Smarter Than That

Rating: 9/10 ⭐

Every major review of Dhurandhar: The Revenge leads with the same word: propaganda. IGN gave it a 5/10. Indian Express, 2 out of 5. Variety, NYT, The Hindu, all fixated on the Modi election sequence, the demonetisation subplot, the political undertones.

Read enough of these reviews and you'd think Aditya Dhar made a four-hour campaign ad that accidentally turned into a movie.

I watched the film yesterday. I have a different take.

This isn't propaganda. It's a great spy thriller where political events happen to be load-bearing plot devices, and that distinction matters more than critics want to admit.

The Propaganda Problem (And Why It's Lazy Criticism)

Here's what bothers me about the propaganda framing: it assumes the political beats exist to serve an agenda rather than the story. But watch how demonetisation actually functions in the film. It doesn't arrive as a celebration.

It arrives as a plot mechanism that disrupts the financial networks Hamza has spent years infiltrating. The Modi election sequence works the same way. It's a temporal anchor that marks a shift in the geopolitical landscape the characters are operating in.

Are these beats politically convenient? Sure. But convenient for the narrative, not for a party. Critics were so busy scanning for ideology that they stopped evaluating craft.

When a period film set in the 2010s references events from the 2010s, that's not propaganda. That's setting.

This Is a Double Agent Film, Not a Gangster Film

Bollywood right now is drowning in gangster epics. Every other film wants to be the next underworld saga with stylized violence and rise-and-fall arcs. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is doing something structurally different, and it deserves credit for that.

Hamza Ali Mazari's arc is espionage. Infiltration. Slow-burn betrayal. This is a film about a double agent who dealt a serious blow to terrorism networks in Pakistan, and Ranveer Singh carries that weight across nearly four hours without the story collapsing.

The pacing is brisk for a film of this length. Scenes move with purpose. Subplots feed the main line instead of distracting from it.

At nearly four hours, this is one of the longest Bollywood films in recent memory. For context, Lagaan runs 3 hours 44 minutes, and LOC Kargil clocks in at over four hours. But unlike those films, Dhurandhar: The Revenge doesn't feel its runtime.

The momentum rarely drops. The Inox Insignia sofa seats helped, but the film did most of the heavy lifting on its own.

The Rehman Dakait-Shaped Hole

Spoilers from here.

Let me be honest about what the film is missing: Akshaye Khanna.

In Dhurandhar, Rehman Dakait was the show-stealer. That corridor walk, where he strides down a hallway with terrifying confidence, improvising a dance move to Flipperachi's Bahraini hip-hop track "FA9LA," became one of the most viral Bollywood scenes in recent memory. It wasn't choreographed swagger. It was menace disguised as charisma, and Akshaye Khanna owned every frame of it.

Rehman Dakait dies in Part 1. The Julius Caesar parallel, Hamza as Brutus and the ghost scene, gave that death dramatic weight. But in The Revenge, Akshaye Khanna is reduced to a glimpse. A flashback. A memory.

Ranveer Singh is excellent in this film. He carries the emotional core, handles the espionage tension, delivers in the dramatic moments. But swagger isn't the same as menace.

There are moments in Part 2 that try to echo the Rehman Dakait energy: confident walks, loaded silences. Ranveer doesn't quite land what Akshaye brought. What the film gains in Ranveer's range, it loses in Rehman's absence.

That's not a knock on Ranveer. That says everything about how singular Akshaye Khanna's performance was in Part 1.

The Jameel Jamali Twist

Major spoiler ahead.

The Jameel Jamali twist is the kind of narrative turn that justifies sitting through a four-hour film. I won't walk through every detail, but here's what I will say: it reframes what you thought you were watching. It takes a character you've been reading one way and flips the lens completely.

Sara Arjun does subtle, important work as Yalina Jamali in the scenes leading up to the reveal. What seemed incidental suddenly carries weight. Background details snap into focus.

This is patient, confident storytelling from Aditya Dhar. The kind of setup that only pays off if you trust your audience to sit with the film long enough.

Here's what frustrates me: almost no major review discusses this twist in terms of craft. How it's built. How it lands. What it does to the audience's relationship with the story.

That tells you everything about where the critical conversation went wrong. Everyone was writing about politics. Nobody was writing about the filmmaking.

Where It Actually Stumbles

The final fight between Hamza and Major Iqbal drags. This is the one place where the film's length becomes a problem.

Arjun Rampal does solid work as Major Iqbal throughout the film, but the choreography and pacing of their final confrontation doesn't match the intelligence of everything that came before it. The climax mistakes duration for intensity.

By the third act, Dhar has earned the audience's investment. But the Hamza-Iqbal showdown overstays its welcome when it should have been tighter, meaner, and more surgical.

It's a fistfight ending to a chess game movie. That's the film's real flaw. Not politics. Craft.

The Film Critics Should Have Reviewed

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a 9/10 for me. It's a great movie hiding behind a controversy that has nothing to do with its quality.

Nearly four hours, no intermission energy dip, a twist that lands, performances that hold, and a structural ambition that most Bollywood films wouldn't even attempt.

The conversation around this film should be about Aditya Dhar's storytelling. How he weaves political history into narrative architecture, how he manages a massive ensemble cast without losing focus, how he built a sequel that doesn't just continue the story but deepens it.

Instead, the conversation produced 50 reviews that all say the same thing about propaganda.

I think they're wrong. And I think when the noise dies down, this film will age better than the reviews.