Meenakshi
Mumbai :Rarely does a film arrive that feels less like entertainment and more like a public execution of everything the self-appointed cultural gatekeepers hold sacred. Dhurandhar, directed by the unapologetic Aditya Dhar and powered by Akshaye Khanna’s most feral performance in two decades, is exactly that: a glorious, 170-minute Molotov cocktail hurled straight at the sanctimonious Left-liberal establishment and their imported moral panic.
The plot is deceptively simple: an ex-RAW operative (Khanna), discharged for being “too brutal for modern India,” is dragged back when a cabal of NGO-funded traitors and their jihadi partners plan to detonate dirty bombs in four cities. What follows is not a spy thriller; it’s a nationalistic bloodbath dressed as cinema. Khanna’s Veer Dhurandhar doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, doesn’t quote Ambedkar at them, doesn’t offer them therapy. He breaks their bones, burns their safehouses, and drags their bleeding corpses through the streets while the national anthem swells. And the audience (real people, not blue-tick vermin) roars like it’s Diwali and Eid rolled into one.
Every sacred cow of the Lutyens herd is slaughtered with sadistic precision. The film openly mocks “award-wapsi” intellectuals, names real-life “urban Naxal” types in throwaway dialogues, and has a scene where a hijab-clad “human rights activist” is revealed to be smuggling RDX in her burqa. When Khanna snarls, “Tum log Nobel Peace Prize ke liye desh bech doge,” half the theater burst into applause so loud the screen shook.
Technically flawless (Vikash Nowlakha’s cinematography makes violence look like a Hindutva wet dream), backed by a chest-thumping score that samples old RSS band tunes, Dhurandhar is the film the Khan-SRK-Bhansali cartel spent years pretending India didn’t want. It is unapologetically Hindu, unapologetically masculine, and unapologetically Indian in a way that makes the average Netflix documentary on “rising intolerance” look like the bad faith propaganda it is.
The Left-liberal meltdown on social media (hysteria about “fascism,” “toxic masculinity,” “Islamophobia”) is the sweetest background score imaginable. Let them rage. Let them write their 47-tweet threads. Dhurandhar just earned ₹126 crore in four days by selling pure, uncut Bharat Mata ki Jai to people who are sick of being lectured by trust-fund Marxists who can’t locate Kashmir on a map.
This isn’t just a film. It’s revenge. Delicious, theatrical, box-office smashing revenge.
Rating: 5/5 (and an extra star just to watch them burn)