‘Dhurandhar’ review: Pakistan-set film offers sadism and expert bad vibes

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The last thing we hear in Dhurandhar is: Yeh naya Hindustan hai. Yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur maarega bhi—this is the new India.

It’ll break into your home, and kill you too. It’s a callback to Aditya Dhar’s previous film, Uri: The Surgical Strike, also about an Indian operation conducted on Pakistani soil. The word ‘ghusna’, with its connotations of an initial breach, feels more appropriate for the 2019 film, which ventures a few miles across the border for a short while.

Dhurandhar, on the other hand, barely steps out of Karachi after setting down its bags there in the first half hour. The film is so immersed in Pakistan that India becomes a blip on TV screens. Hindi cinema was building up to this.

Pakistan has lived rent-free in the minds of Bollywood directors and writers, the villain of almost every war or spy film for a while now. Every now and then, a Hindi film will set its story there, whether partially, like Gadar 2, or entirely, like The Diplomat. Yet, these films are seldom interested in Pakistan, its practices and politics and nuances.

Their attention is squarely on India, which makes their vision of Pakistan less than vivid. Dhurandhar has problems but an indifferent Pakistan isn’t one of them. Rather, Dhar’s fantasy Karachi is about the most exciting, dangerous setting you can imagine.

It’s where Hamza Ali Mazari (Ranveer Singh) is sent by Indian intelligence as a deep undercover asset in the aftermath of the IC-814 hijacking in 1999 and the 2001 Parliament attack. His mission is to infiltrate the gangs of Lyari, a borough with a history of underworld rivalry. He manages to impress the biggest bad, Rehman Dakait (Akshaye Khanna), and is inducted into the brutal