'Dhurandhar' Movie Review: No Love Lost or Found In Ranveer Singh's Spy Thriller

Since deception is the language of a spy thriller, let’s pretend that movies exist entirely in isolation — like an introvert on a Saturday night. Let’s pretend that Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar’s directorial return after Uri (2019), has absolutely nothing to do with the world around us. (One could argue that it doesn’t, but that’s a mob attack for another day). Let’s also pretend that film criticism is about seeing a movie for what it is, regardless of its moral character or ideology. It’s only fair, given that we all admire great serial killers for being awesome at what they do, legendary dictators for being no-nonsense leaders, wars for being the epitome of courage and technology, and plane crashes for doing tragedy so well.

By these parameters alone, Dhurandhar is not a great film. The title refers to the name of a mission featuring a badass spy who infiltrates the enemy nation so totally that one wonders if the film itself knows where its loyalties lie by the end. The mafia, underworld-politician nexus, gang and turf wars, the fetishized chaos — our lion-maned hero goes so undercover that the very fiber of the genre disappears. It’s almost a gangster biopic that forgets it’s a nationalistic espionage drama. In other words, it gets carried away with its own ruse. Imagine the Trojan Horse being rolled into the city of Troy, except the Greeks get too comfortable inside the horse and begin to enjoy the noise outside; this analogy applies even if Troy is the unsuspecting viewer and the horse is the elaborately constructed film. Dhurandhar is also unacceptably long (214 minutes, and this is only Part 1), narratively crowded (despite the Uri-like chapters), occasionally stylish, and overdoes the musicality-of-violence template (where banger techno-laced tracks accompany set pieces) to the point where it stops looking cool. I’m fine with the gore and torture porn, but if the idea is to show that brutality and barbarism are normal in this part of the globe, then even the provocations feel repetitive. And there’s the fundamental mistake of having a spy whose backstory we will only learn of in the second film, which means he’s just a brooding hoodlum in this one. Knowing nothing about him is one thing; knowing less than nothing is another.

So it’s best if we do not divorce Dhurandhar from its context. Leave the pretending to the film and its protagonist. If anything, this context makes it easier to engage with. It opens in 1999 during the Kandahar hijack, where pensive IB chief Ajay Sanyal (R Madhavan) — the latest entry in Hindi cinema’s NSA Ajit Doval multiverse — negotiates the release of the hostages, but is disappointed with the top brass caving into the demands of the terrorists. (I’ll be careful with the references, because the term “fictional film inspired by real events” means that historical authenticity will be cited if the film-making is questioned, and fiction will be cited if the historical authenticity is questioned). Sanyal yells “Bharat Mata Ki” but does not hear a “Jai” from the frightened passengers because a gun is pointed at them by an evil man who mocks Hindus. Not long after, the 2001 Parliament attack happens; another gruesome death of an Indian appears as a reminder, a nudge to kickstart the revenge. Sanyal proposes Operation Dhurandhar, a long-term infiltration mission aimed to dismantle the core of Pakistan’s terrorism network. It’s method acting taken too far.

Enter Hamza Ali (Ranveer Singh), the stoic Indian agent who sets his sights on Karachi’s Lyari and its mafia network. Over a two-hour-wide first half, Hamza pretends to be a Baloch fighter and penetrates the gang of Rahman Dakait (Akshaye Khanna), a local king-maker with so much main-character energy that he not once suspects that Hamza is a handsome puppeteer. Hamza counts on the egos of the Pakistani gangsters and politicians, thriving in the shadows while they turn on each other like a pack of wolves. Mr. Sanyal insists that they play the long game and keep collecting intel so that “some day it will be useful to a leader who actually cares for the country”. Hamza even honey-traps the 19-year-old daughter of a minister. If you find this creepy, remember that Hamza’s excuse is his loyalty towards his country. All is fair in love and patriotism; he’d do anything — including becoming a predator (the lion’s mane makes sense) and an Animal-coded hero — for the sake of India. The tension of Hamza being exposed as a mole makes Rahman Dakait the Jack Nicholson character in The Departed — a comparison that nearly befits Khanna’s pulpy and fun face-acting as yet another Muslim baddie, putting into perspective just how much the prosthetics in Chhaava restricted his swag.

This film makes a few interesting creative choices. For instance, everyone but the low-key Hamza gets a Tarantino-style intro sequence. All the Pakistani characters have slow-mo entry shots or at least name plates, a nod to Hamza’s anonymity and the others’ high-profile presence in a story where they think they’re the string-pullers and starboys. It brings to mind Ranveer Singh’s entry in Gully Boy (2019), in the background, as one of the two ‘friends’ to a character who behaves like he’s the one who owns a rags-to-riches story; both movies are based in a Muslim-majority setting, yet the message could not be more different. The framework of Dhurandhar is also full of possibilities. Singh plays a role within a role within a role at times, because his subterfuge as an Indian spy gets buried in his subterfuge as a Pakistani henchman who keeps switching sides. Even when he invites suspicion, it’s about which faction he’s working for, not which country he comes from.

The problem with Dhurandhar, of course, is that its single-minded worldview flattens the storytelling. The spy-action genre is rooted in the vulnerability and the toll of the job — the conflict between an inherent humanity and hard-nosed professionalism. Agents struggle to foster any kind of lives or identities of their own in pursuit of guile. Movies like Dhurandhar, though, leave no room for any kind of self-doubt and existentialism; there is no place for a moral tug of war. The only humanity that Hamza is allowed to feel is nationalism at any cost; emotions flicker on his face only when he thinks of the suffering in his country. He gets flashbacks of not people but calamities (like the 26/11 Mumbai bombings), almost as if those like him are hardwired to exhibit only one brand of trauma. As a result, he barely feels like a flesh-and-blood hero even when he bleeds. Singh plays many roles within each other, but it’s the one he plays too hard — that of pretending to not be a complex, loaded character — that defines the performance. Every time the film threatens to enter Raazi territory — where a young female spy struggles to be treacherous in a culture that isn’t as sinister as her training led her to believe — you can tell that it pulls back. Hamza does not hesitate, and the only failure that registers is the failure to destroy the enemy.

Ranveer Singh in a still from 'Dhurandhar'

Similarly, when he infiltrates the Rahman gang, the film keeps itself from portraying them as regular crooks. You can tell that they’re colourful personalities, and they’re fond of Hamza too, but when the betrayal does happen, the writing refuses to mine Hamza’s guilt or show them as casualties in a bigger mission; it’s always that they deserve it by virtue of who they are. The desire to paint every Pakistani as a sinner and a fool is at odds with the film’s decision to give them so much screen time; it’s often torn between playing them up (Khanna has more entry shots than single-screen superstars) and cutting them down to size. It’s not a new stance, but Dhurandhar is so obsessive with it that the film-making tries to offset its agenda and lack of nuance with a slick action aesthetic. Since it cannot explore character traits and human emotions, it resorts to hyperstylized violence and inventive chases; many of them are craftily staged, but it’s obvious that they are the fillers meant to amplify the film’s rage. The script has a field day with this rhetoric. At one point, the fourth wall is shattered; it’s just a red screen with white transcripts of taped calls between the 26/11 handlers and the shooters; at another point, there are hints of a conspiracy that led to demonetisation; it even appropriates age-old movements and communal strife to show that nothing is holy. Fortunately, it stops inches short of blaming Pakistan for the meteor strike that wiped out dinosaurs, or for being the serpent that persuaded Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. It has boundaries.

What this does is also blunt the grand-standing dialogue designed to be catchphrases. None of them (“the no. 1 enemy of Indians is India; Pakistan is no. 2”) have the noxious ring of Uri’s “ghar mein ghus ke maarenge,” a line that eventually makes a comeback to rescue Hamza’s journey to nowhere. There are so many swipes at 2000s Indian policy-making that the film often loses track of its own stakes. 214 minutes are a lot under most circumstances, not least when everyone and everything else — except India — lives rent-free in its head. In terms of invading geopolitical fortresses under the cover of darkness, movies like Uri, Article 370 and the recent Baramulla are more effective than Dhurandhar. I remember starting the Chhaava review with a Tour de France metaphor about how, if everyone is doping in a sport, is anyone really doping? It becomes about who does it the best, and who the most flamboyant and convincing cheater is. In that sense, Dhurandhar isn’t exactly the Lance Armstrong of its ilk. It gets sidetracked by its own trickery. Forget realism and tainted triumphs, even the entertainment feels like a red herring. In isolation, after all, it’s just a wooden horse parked inside the gates of another land.