Dhurandhar 2 Is A Pumped Up Adrenaline Rush Which Normalizes Violence

At one heart stopping point in the craggy narrative, a shop’s shutter is hurled down on the necks of prostrate victims. Never seen such slaying, slaughter and butchery…all for a cause, of course. Full marks for inventive carnage. No sacrifice, and by extension, no mayhem is too much to save your country from extraneous threats. “Us mulk ki Sarhad ko koi choo nahin sakta,” Mohammed Rafi sang in Aankhen decades ago. Those films about preserving the sanctity of the Indian border seem like child’s prayers compared to Dhurandhar and its companion piece, which opened to a roaring ovation.

Can writer-director Aditya Dhar fail with his patriotic pitch? Pitch perfect, of course. The mood is more murderous and unforgiving than in the earlier film. The surprise element is largely missing, except for two forced twists at the interval and climax—audience-baiting that harks back to old-school mass entertainment. This is more of the same sock-in-the-solar-plexus mayhem, multiplied many times over, yet not entirely gratuitous—more like a dirty job that someone has to do. Many unforeseen methods of torture and murder surface in this four-hour flood of blood and gore, which is never a bore. This is no place for the squeamish. Severed heads and limbs abound.

Advertisement

By the time we reach the one-to-one combat between Hamza (Ranveer Singh) and Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), the mood is relentlessly angry. A tongue is painfully squeezed by a son who thinks his father talks too much; enemies are impaled in a milk factory while the perpetrator sips a milkshake; in a loo fight, a knife is driven into an adversary’s eye—a reminder of how much must be sacrificed to settle scores with the enemy. So much of the playing time goes into choreographed violence that the storytelling often feels like a pretext. Did Dhar first conceive ways to make the enemy moan before building a patriotic plot around it? As a compilation of action choreography, Dhurandhar: The Revenge works well. It is a very angry film with little comic or erotic relief. No item song like the first one—I missed that, and Dhar’s softer aesthetic touches.

Amidst the amplified action, women are barely given a voice. Sara Arjun, assertive earlier, is now almost absent. Yami Gautam’s cameo barely registers. More than Ranveer Singh’s vendetta, it is the violence that dominates this cataclysmic film. The rusty-brown skin tone of the frames enhances the zeal to get even with the terror academy. There is no restraint in the way enemies are neutralized. Dawood Ibrahim is reduced to a helpless figure, while others seem directionless once their guns fall silent. Shashwat Sachdev’s music is eclectic. Why include Bappi Lahiri’s “Tamma Tamma” and Boney M’s “Rasputin” when neither complements the narrative? They feel like reminders of spectacle rather than reflections of mood. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is not better than the first segment, nor does it try to be. The world remains dangerous, especially for those protecting us. We participate by proxy, indulging in the guilty pleasure of watching enemies being neutralized—for which we remain grateful to Aditya Dhar.