It's never a good idea for a critic to try and pin down a director's morality from their output, but Dhurandhar 2: The Deadening is the first movie I've seen for many years with long stretches that appear governed by a truly sociopathic sensibility. Fine, so to protect India, Hamza has to blow some bad guys away, and sure, so now we learn this man's doing what he's gotta do to protect India's wives and daughters, forever in peril from nefarious Muslims. (Hamza's own child bride (Sara Arjun) gains a kid in this sequel, but otherwise has nothing to do - and little to say for herself - until being called up for damsel-in-distress duty in the final hour. This, too, is a form of national service.) But writer-director Aditya Dhar - possessed of the online edgelord's need to push ever further, towards vicious extremes - wants us to see and cheer each snap of the neck, every limb torn from limb; he wants a standing ovation when Hamza forces his pistol into an opponent's occluded eye socket. There is zero distance between the direction and these characters; there is, instead, an absolute, in places borderline crazed commitment to the same murderous cause. It's a good job Dhar's only holding a camera, because God only knows the damage he'd do with an actual weapon. The Revenge explained to me why even this filmmaker's most starry-eyed defenders have sounded so vague and dazed in their descriptions of what in these films has worked for them; in leaning so far into this blunt-force cinema, they too have been smacked upside the head. (They weren't compelled so much as concussed.) In this world, even Jaskirat's closest childhood friend winds up with a syringe in the eyeball and a bathtub to the back of the neck (yay?); Dhar drafts in his wife Yami Gautam Dhar for a one-scene second-half cameo as a medical angel of death, which seems a deeply morbid way for a conservative to keep things in the family. Either way, the casual Islamophobia of the first movie is here overwritten by a more generalised contempt, for humanity in toto. I had to laugh when Hamza removed the toxin-laced sticking plaster he so carefully applied ahead of a (failed) assassination attempt, and promptly tossed it from a moving car's window: sure, that won't do any harm on the streets. Life is cheap here; movies are long; and sacrifice is both paramount and inevitable.
It turns out Dhurandhar needs its violence, firstly because it presents as the only way for Dhar to resolve his exhaustingly tangled plot, cursed with a thousand and one shady types, few of whom we're given cause to know or care about before they get eviscerated. The Revenge charts the fallout, both gangland and political, from the events of film one, and the more bodies that hit the floor - whether shot, stabbed or dropped from a high building - the fewer men there are left standing. Dhar affords himself some variation in his kill scenes: a certain seriousness when it comes to state-sanctioned murder, and a glibber, quack-quack-oops comedy elsewhere. The violence is the constant; death is all these films have got. Granted, The Revenge piles up more deaths and more spectacular deaths. Arjun Rampal's beardy big bad has his ankle flayed off before the rest of him is redeployed as a human stopper in a kerosene tank: bad idea, kablooey. (In 4DX, you get to pick pieces of him out of your popcorn.) But behind it all sits a rank and festering nihilism: it's India or nothing. Were there not a gang war kicking off or a knife fight in the works, Dhurandhar would consist solely of scenes of varyingly doughy middle-aged men sitting around and making threats or deals. Maybe that's the India the BJP want, but it hardly makes for good cinema. Dhar lost something when he killed off Akshaye Khanna, with his sleek, economical style of villainy, at the end of film one; now we're left with a crotch-grabbing Sanjay Dutt, always a much cruder performer in a flagwaving context. The material is no good for Ranveer, either: one of India's great contemporary stars now has to try and balance the equation of having his biggest commercial hits with two of the most worthless films he will ever make. Not every role Singh takes has to be a Rocky Randhawa, of course, but The Revenge forces him into alternately glowering and bellowing; with his charm buried beneath a wig that reminded me of the Rock Profile idea of Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees, he's just a numbed face splattered in his victims' blood. Hamza is permitted just one (understandable) smile in these four hours, upon returning to that all-singing, all-dancing terrorist training camp - emphasis on camp - that we glimpsed midway through film one, where potential mujahideen are drilled along the lines of Rockettes with rockets. (I can see the reviews now: Five stars! Commit atrocities for a ticket!)
So where does all this carnage leave us, and where does it leave the Hindi mainstream? After a decade or so in which Bollywood has struggled to define itself anew - the old stars wheezily receding from sight along with their hairlines, the old commercial formulas not quite delivering as they once did, streaming media and Southern industries with better ideas manoeuvring past the lumbering Bombay machine on the outside - the past twelve months do look to have opened up two viable if diverging paths: the timeless, youth-skewing love story (as represented by last summer's smash Saiyaara) and the frothing, male-oriented fury Dhar's one-two has brought to the table, which - like it or not - does seem very now. Given the money the two Dhurandhars have thus far raked in between them - and it surprises me that the series' ardent-to-rabid fans haven't thought to knock up a website showing the gross spiralling upwards by the second, like the figures on a Wall Street ticker - I suspect this will now be the road more travelled by producers; Indian cinemagoers have voted decisively with their backsides, even if they're backing themselves and their cinema into an obvious dead end. (To paraphrase the poets of dystopia: you do it to yourselves, you do, and that's why it really hurts.) The Dhurandhars are so clearly the kind of runaway hit that - much as the appearance of Punxsutawney Phil's shadow in Groundhog Day predicts heavy weather - all but guarantees another decade of truly rotten cinema, of imitations and knock-offs bound to the same punitive length and cruelty, yet made by less skilful creatives with lesser players and lesser songs. In a fully functioning cinema ecosystem, dumbass action movies like these wouldn't be seized upon as state-of-the-nation texts. Yet the Dhurandhar project probably is reflective of where India's head - and its soul - is at as 2026 starts in earnest, with its politicos cheerleading for Israel's ever-mounting outrages while waging wars on their own minorities at home. That doesn't make these films' wild success any less depressing, whether sat through in person or considered in hindsight. One perverse positive, which is really the least Dhar could do for us: after enduring seven gruelling hours of this, Gibson's Passion of the Christ sequel is likely to seem like What Women Want.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge is now showing in selected cinemas.
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