Ranveer Singh carries the action in Dhurandhar 2 — But it is his grief underneath that you cannot shake

There is a version of Ranveer Singh that most of India has grown up watching. He walks into rooms like he owns them. He cries like his chest might cave in. He laughs like something is at stake. For over a decade, his instinct on screen has been to give everything, hold nothing back, and trust that the audience will come along for it. That instinct has made him one of the biggest stars in the country.

It is also precisely what Dhurandhar: The Revenge asks him to abandon.

In this film, Ranveer plays Jaskirat Singh Rangi — a man who has buried his real identity so deep inside the undercover persona of Hamza Ali Mazari that expression itself becomes dangerous. A spy cannot afford to flinch at the wrong moment, react a beat too early, or let grief flicker across his face in the wrong room. The role demands something Ranveer has rarely been tested on: the ability to say everything while appearing to say nothing.

And he pulls it off. The performance is quieter than anything he has done before. There is a physical stillness to him in The Revenge that sits in deliberate contrast to the restless, magnetic energy he brought to Bajirao Mastani, Gully Boy, and even the first Dhurandhar, where the ensemble around him — particularly Akshaye Khanna — often drew as much attention as he did. Here, he is the gravitational centre of a much larger film, and he holds that weight without reaching for volume.

But this is not a cold performance. The drama is still there — it is just compressed. When it finally surfaces, in moments tied to family, to the 26/11 attacks, to the personal cost of a life lived in disguise, it hits with the force of something that has been building for a long time. The restraint is not the absence of emotion. It is the accumulation of it.

That contrast — action on the surface, drama underneath — is what separates this from being a straightforward spy film. Ranveer is not just running and shooting. He is carrying a character who has sacrificed his own identity in service of a cause, and the weight of that is visible even when the film does not stop to announce it.

In the first film, he was finding his footing in this register. In The Revenge, he has mastered it.

Long before most audiences had sat down to watch the film, Ranveer Singh's fanbase had already decided it was going to be something significant.

Fan clubs across Instagram, X, and WhatsApp groups began coordinating advance bookings weeks before release. First-day-first-show tickets in major cities sold out in hours, not days.

Trailer-based edits — cut entirely from promotional material — had been circulating for weeks, doing work that no studio campaign could fully replicate.

The edits focused specifically on the newer, more controlled version of Ranveer: close-ups of stillness, moments of quiet fury, the suggestion of a performer operating in a different gear.

The phrase that took hold was "serious Ranveer." It became its own thread in fan conversations, its own argument. The idea that the most charismatic actor of his generation was choosing to disappear into a role, to underplay rather than dominate — that narrative travelled fast. It drew in curious viewers who might not otherwise have rushed to a spy thriller on opening day.

The preview shows on 18 March, a full day before the official release, generated an extraordinary ₹43 crore — a figure that signalled, before a single review had been published, that the audience was already there.

The opening day collected over ₹102 crore, and by the end of its second weekend the film had crossed ₹1,250 crore worldwide — numbers driven not just by scale, but by repeat viewings. Audiences going back a second and third time is not a box office accident. It is the sign of a film — and a performance — that people want to sit with again.

Ranveer Singh's fanbase did not mobilise for a franchise. They mobilised for a proof of concept. And the proof held.