How Dhurandhar 2 turned its villain human and its hero a machine – And why that's genius

Most action films do not spend much time worrying about their villains. They are there to be defeated. They exist to give the hero something to fight. Their motivations, if they have any at all, are usually thin enough to ignore.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is not most action films.

The story of Jaskirat Singh Rangi begins in tragedy. After his family is brutalised — his father killed, his sisters assaulted, one of them murdered — he takes his own revenge and finds himself on death row. It is there that IB chief Ajay Sanyal, played by R. Madhavan, walks in and finds a man with nothing left to lose and more anger than he knows what to do with.

Jaskirat wants no part of it. He tells Sanyal plainly that he has no reason to protect a country that could not protect his mother and sister when he needed it most. Sanyal's response is not an apology. He does not offer comfort or promises. Instead, he tells Jaskirat something simpler and harder: that men are required to protect without expecting anything in return. He does not ask for loyalty. He points Jaskirat's rage in a direction and steps back.

It works. And that is precisely the point.

Jaskirat is not recruited through ideology. He is recruited through pain. His grief, his fury, his sense of abandonment — all of it is taken and redirected into the operation. He becomes Hamza Ali Mazari, and Hamza is not a man who questions his mission. He carries guilt. He feels loss. But he never stops. The film uses his humanity to make the weapon feel real, and then keeps the weapon moving.

It's just as Sanyal said – ‘Ghayal Ho Isiliye Ghatak Ho’

Entertainment entrepreneur Akkshay Rathie, who has been following the film closely, put it this way: "Everything that Ranveer Singh's character goes through, the fact that he has that backstory where his family is wronged, he takes revenge and his life is down in the dumps and then to see him emerge from it is the story of somebody rising from the ashes. We always are at a certain level fans of underdog dramas where somebody who is down in the dumps does something that is larger than life and disproportionate to what you normally expect out of people — and that is what makes storytelling great. That is what was done with Ranveer Singh's character, beautifully so."

On the other side of the film sits Major Iqbal.

The man who haunted the audience in the first film — remembered for a brutal scene in which he tortured an Indian spy — arrives in The Revenge with an unexpected dimension. He has an autistic daughter. His wife is no longer alive. And then there is his father, Brigadier Jahangir — a wheelchair-bound, retired Pakistani army official who does not miss an opportunity to remind his son exactly how little he thinks of him.

Despite our disdain for Iqbal, the film makes us feel his mounting frustration and anger — the kind that naturally arise when living with a father like that.

The scenes between them are uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with terrorism or espionage. They are just a son trying, and failing, to earn a father's approval. The audience, almost against their will, understands something about Major Iqbal in those moments.

Rathie sees this as a deliberate act of craft. "The humanisation of characters is something that really creates relatability," he said. "You want to feel a whole lot of emotions about a person — whether it is love, hatred, sympathy, whatever — before you see a redemption to the story arc of that character. In the case of Major Iqbal, pretty much every Indian was rooting to see the character die, for Indians to get redemption for everything atrocious that the character had done. And unless you really made that character mean and brutal enough, you would not have that emotional pulse to root for Ranveer Singh to kill him. That is exactly what was done — with a whole lot of clarity and a whole lot of élan by Aditya Dhar — and that is what made the film what it is."

Iqbal's father is ultimately killed by his own son — but even in that moment, the film does not let Iqbal fully claim his power. His inability to pull his father's tongue out before the act becomes a metaphor: the old man's words will always hold importance in the Major's life, whether he is alive or not.

It is a quietly devastating detail in a film full of loud ones.

The contrast between the two characters — one whose humanity is used to power him forward, one whose humanity is used to explain his downfall — is the most interesting structural choice in the duology. Jaskirat is given a soul and then pointed like a weapon. Iqbal is given a wound and then left to fester in it.

The film knows exactly what it is doing. You are never meant to root for Iqbal. But by the time he is gone, you understand, at least partially, how he became the man he was. That is more than most films would ever bother with — and it is what separates Dhurandhar: The Revenge from being merely a very expensive piece of patriotism.