‘Dhurandhar: The Revenge’ review: Sequel rages past the point of exhaustion

Of all the possible callbacks to Dhurandhar, there was one scene that was always going to be revisited in the sequel. At the start of the first film, Intelligence Bureau chief Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan) negotiates with Pakistani hijackers. Their leader, Zahoor (Vivek Sinha), mocks his attempt to get the passengers to complete his cry of ‘Bharat mata ki…’ and tells him that Hindus are a cowardly race. In the sequel, Sanyal speaks to Zahoor again, on video call, after Indian spy Hamza (Ranveer Singh) has beaten him bloody and is pointing a revolver at him. Sanyal gloats a bit, then asks him to complete the slogan he couldn’t all those years ago. This is Aditya Dhar’s cinema in a nutshell: Bharat mata ki jai, down the barrel of a gun.

Before it continues the bloody ascent of Hamza in the Karachi underworld, Dhurandhar: The Revenge gives us the origin story teased in the final moments of the first film. Jaskirat Singh Rangi is a clean-cut young man from Pathankot looking to join the army. Two years later, he's a bomb about to go off. We later learn what caused this change, but first we see Jaskirat snap. In a savagely effective sequence, he lays siege to a household, shooting and stabbing and smashing; the brutality we associate with Hamza but not the mania. He’s tried in court, sentenced to death. The rest we already know: Sanyal picks him out, trains him, sends him as the Balochi Hamza to infiltrate the gangs of Lyari, Karachi and destabilise their networks of fake currency and arms used against India.

Back in Pakistan, there’s a Rehman Dakait-shaped hole in Lyari. It’s also an Akshaye Khanna-shaped hole in the film. His swaggering Rehman was a formidable adversary for Hamza, who just about manages to kill him at the end of Dhurandhar (while making it seem like he tried to save the don’s life). Now, as Hamza rises to the top of the Lyari food chain, it’s all a bit too easy. Newly crowned Baloch gang leader Uzair (Danish Pandor) doesn’t have the smarts; encounter cop Chaudhary Aslam (Sanjay Dutt) is too complacent. The only real threat is ISI chief Major Iqbal, and though Arjun Rampal plays him as a complex mixture of sadism, thoughtfulness and patriotism, he can’t light up scenes the way Khanna did.

In the first film, India was more a peripheral presence, which made the gang wars more compelling. It was even possible to imagine Hamza forgetting why he was there and getting wrapped up in local battles. This time round, it’s hard to invest much in the Lyari underworld with its most charismatic figure missing and with our attention diverted by India's plans. Dhar can fashion hard, serrated action better than any director working in India today—among other things, his instinct for the overhead shot is unerring—but he loses himself in the invention of new brutalities. His previous films have a cold clarity which this lacks, not surprising given it's almost four hours long.

Hamza’s smooth rise coincides with the film entering the BJP years in power. Sanyal—a stand-in for Ajit Doval—spent the first film complaining about a lack of toughness on Pakistan from the (then UPA) government, hoping that one day there’d be leaders “who actually care for India”. He gets his wish in the sequel, which keeps touting Indian initiatives to weaken or threaten Pakistan, often delivered via Narendra Modi cameos on TV. Dhar is a talented director who’s also an unabashed establishment man. His Uri was an ode to the 2016 ‘surgical strikes’; Article 370, which he wrote and produced, showed how Jammu & Kashmir’s statehood was systematically dismantled (Modi and Amit Shah are principal characters in it). Dhurandhar 2 also mentions the cross-border strikes in Uri, but saves its most fawning praise for demonetisation, which is greeted by the film’s Pakistani characters as a debilitating masterstroke.

Dhar’s engagement with history is, unsurprisingly, selective. The 1993 Bombay blasts are referenced but not the riots that preceded them. Babri only comes up in the context of the 2019 Supreme Court judgment. You’d think jihadis and their ISI handlers would use the 2002 Gujarat riots as a rallying cry, but these aren’t mentioned either. There’s a scene where Hamza tries to convince his wife, Yalina (Sara Arjun), that he should be allowed to continue plotting to destroy her nation because of its crimes against India and its own minorities (laughably, this works). The same film is happy to throw India’s minorities under the bus: Muslims of course, but also Sikhs (addicts, separatists), even though its hero is Sikh.

The violence would be a lot more monotonous if it wasn’t for Shashwat Sachdev, whose ability to think in musical fragments is invaluable. His approach seems to me closer to a hip-hop producer than a traditional Bollywood composer: piecing together existing ideas, a Rahman-ish flute here, a metal riff there. If the first film reworked the Punjabi folk song Jogi, this one has a stormy version of Aari Aari. Jaan Se Guzarte Hain is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Dil Pe Zakham Khate Hain with rock guitars. Even the needle drops are perfect: for a party scene in Balochistan, instead of trying to match the viral Flipperachi number from the first film, they repurpose Khaled’s 1992 banger Didi.

Dhurandhar has more rage than it knows what to do with. Both films unfold primarily in Pakistan, but there’s not one fond thought about the place in their cumulative seven-and-a-half hours. You can feel Dhar’s contempt for Pakistan in all his choices: in throwaway jokes like playing ‘Tamma Tamma Loge’ over a funeral service, in the Pakistani characters being shifty-eyed and unkempt and degenerate, in the crude propaganda of a Sikh couple burnt alive by a religious mob. These films reflect the obscene spectacle of modern warfare, where images of extreme violence coexist with casual entertainment on social media feeds; disturbingly, it yearns for India to be more than a spectator.

For someone who’s essentially coerced by the state into a life of spying, Jaskirat is remarkably free of doubt or remorse. The film has no doubts either. Dhar wants the audience laughing and baying for blood at the same time. That’s why he starts with a quote from the Gita—divine sanction for hyperviolent wish fulfilment.

‘Dhurandhar: The Revenge’ is in theatres.