Dhurandhar (2025): Akshaye Khanna Commands Every Frame He Occupies
Ranveer Singh sits across a Karachi mob boss, gun already loaded with lies, and you believe every syllable he doesn’t say. This is a spy film that earns its tension through performance rather than spectacle, and Singh’s slow-burn moral unravelling is what keeps its three-and-a-half-hour runtime from collapsing under its own ambition.
Akshaye Khanna Turns Rehman Dakait Into a Political Force of Nature
Akshaye Khanna is operating at a frequency most actors in this film can’t match. His Rehman isn’t just a mob boss, he’s a towering figure inside Pakistan’s political machinery, celebrating the 26/11 attacks with ISI officer Major Iqbal as if it were a personal victory.
I have rarely seen a Bollywood villain this effortlessly convinced of his own ideology. The scene where Rehman kills rival Babu with a weighing stone, proclaiming Baloch dominance, is the kind of character-establishing moment that lesser films rush. Khanna doesn’t rush anything.
Aditya Dhar Structures Dhurandhar as a Labyrinth That Occasionally Loses Its Own Thread
Aditya Dhar’s direction is most confident when navigating Pakistan’s political machinery and the ISI’s underground nexus. The chapter-based structure gives the narrative a deliberate, peeling quality, each layer tightening the knot around Hamza’s cover identity.
The screenplay’s strength is its psychological groundwork. Hamza’s infiltration of Rehman Dakait’s gang, beginning with a firearm demonstration at a hospital, is handled with bruised-knuckle nerve-tightening craft rather than glossy action choreography. That restraint is a choice that mostly pays off.
Where Dhar stumbles is predictability. The betrayal mechanics arrive on schedule, and some chapter transitions feel mechanical rather than earned. Two dialogue sequences, particularly Madhavan delivering a line about a new India and Ranveer responding “ye naya India hai”, land with the subtlety of a political poster, puncturing the film’s otherwise careful tone.
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Madhavan and Sanjay Dutt Add Weight Without Overstaying
R Madhavan’s IB chief Ajay Sanyal is the architect who recruits Hamza from death row, and Madhavan plays the role with quiet bureaucratic authority. He doesn’t need many scenes, he just needs to mean something in the ones he has, and he does.
Sanjay Dutt as SP Aslam is shrewder than he first appears. His arc, plotting Rehman’s downfall alongside Hamza, then physically subduing Rehman after the climactic crash, gives Dutt something physically and dramatically meaty to work with. Rakesh Bedi’s Jameel, whose collusion is finally exposed through a compromising video Hamza engineers, is a quieter piece in the puzzle but no less effective.
Dhurandhar Is Scoring at the Box Office Because It Delivers Where Spy Thrillers Must
The film is scoring big at the box office, and that isn’t surprising. Audiences are responding to what works: the Karachi underworld setting feels genuinely immersive rather than a Bollywood approximation of it. The ISI-underworld nexus is torn from within rather than stormed from outside, which is a more interesting structural choice.
The scene where Hamza witnesses Major Iqbal torture an Indian spy, then relays intelligence during a weapons transport, is the kind of moment that makes the genre work. It’s procedural dread rather than action-movie adrenaline. The livestreaming of LTF officer torture to force Rehman’s release is where the film’s moral ambiguity is sharpest. Hamza has become the thing he was sent to destroy, and the film is honest about that cost.
The audience complaints about uneven narrative and predictable plotting aren’t wrong. But the complaints about dialogues framing enemy-state hatred feel slightly misread, the film is set inside a hostile intelligence network. The real problem is that those two specific lines feel written for a trailer rather than for a character.
Closing Thoughts
If you can commit to three hours and thirty-three minutes of chapter-structured spy craft, Dhurandhar rewards you, not consistently, but meaningfully. Akshaye Khanna alone is worth the price of a large-screen ticket, and Ranveer Singh’s controlled work here is among his most disciplined. The uneven stretches are real, but the film’s core, an undercover agent dismantling a terror network from inside Karachi’s underworld, is executed with genuine intelligence.
Dhurandhar (2025) is a flawed but genuinely gripping spy thriller that earns a 3.5 out of 5, carried across the finish line by two performances that refuse to let the narrative’s predictability win.
Ankit Jaiswal is the Chief Author, covering Indian cinema and OTT releases with honest, no-filler criticism. An SEO strategist by background, he brings a research-driven approach to film writing, cutting through hype to tell you exactly what's worth your time.
