Seven days before Dhurandhar: The Revenge opens in theatres, the internet is already arguing about how it should end. This is not unusual for a film of this magnitude – a sequel to the highest-grossing Hindi film in history, starring Ranveer Singh in what critics are already calling the performance of his career, directed by Aditya Dhar who proved with Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) that he understands how to close a national story with maximum emotional impact. The argument is, in this case, unusually specific and unusually rich, because the first film left its threads not merely open but vibrating with implication.
Dhurandhar (2025) ended with the confirmation that Hamza Ali Mazari – the Karachi underworld’s most feared operator, the man who rose through the Lyari gang’s ranks to become its de facto king after orchestrating the death of Rehman Dakait – is, in fact, Jaskirat Singh Rangi, an Indian death-row inmate turned covert operative for Intelligence Bureau Director Ajay Sanyal’s Operation Dhurandhar. The mission has consumed a decade of his life and everything that the word “self” might have meant before Sanyal recruited him. He has a wife – Yalina, daughter of politician Jameel Jamali – who married Hamza and does not know she is married to a phantom. He has a handler – Mohammed Aalam, the juice shop owner – who is the only person in Karachi who knows the truth of who Hamza is. He has a mission target: Majo, the figure whose elimination represents the completion of Operation Dhurandhar’s original mandate, the avenging of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
And he has Major Iqbal of the ISI – Arjun Rampal in the sequel, based on real-life terrorist-soldier Ilyas Kashmiri – who is closing in on him from a direction that pure criminal cunning cannot fully deflect.
The trailer for The Revenge released on March 7, 2026 has been analyzed frame by frame by fans who have correctly identified a shredded Indian passport on the table behind Yalina when she picks up a gun. The implication is shattering: she has found evidence that her husband is not who she believed him to be. The relationship that was Hamza’s most intimate human anchor in the first film – the marriage to Yalina, which was strategically arranged but which carried genuine warmth in Ranveer Singh’s performance – is now the duology’s most explosive unexploded device.
This article explores seven alternative endings to Dhurandhar: The Revenge, written one week before the film opens. We do not know how Aditya Dhar has resolved these threads. We do know enough – from the first film’s architecture, from the trailer’s careful signals, from the real historical events the film fictionalizes, and from the genre conventions of the spy thriller that Dhar both uses and subverts – to imagine what the alternatives would mean. Each alternative ending illuminates different aspects of what the duology is really about: the cost of total commitment to a cause, the question of whether a man who has lived as someone else can return to himself, the relationship between national duty and personal love, and the specific Indian anxiety about what it means to be willing to die for your country in a war that your country will never officially acknowledge.
Part One: Understanding the Setup That Demands a Resolution
What the First Film Built
Dhurandhar (2025) is, at its core, a film about the making of a weapon. Ajay Sanyal – R. Madhavan playing a character clearly based on former IB Director and current NSA Ajit Doval – identifies Jaskirat Singh Rangi not because Jaskirat is exceptional but because he is expendable. A young Punjabi criminal on death row has no family with leverage over him, no political connections to complicate his extraction if needed, and enough raw survival intelligence to be shaped into something useful. The film’s first hour is the shaping: the training, the cover construction, the insertion via Torkham into Pakistan’s vast and lawless underworld.
The transformation from Jaskirat into Hamza is the film’s most psychologically sophisticated element. Jaskirat does not simply adopt a new name and a new accent. He must construct a complete human being from the ground up – a history, a set of loyalties, a personality that is simultaneously credible to Karachi’s most paranoid gangsters and flexible enough to serve India’s intelligence goals. The film does not pretend this transformation is without cost. By the time Hamza has risen to the apex of Lyari’s criminal hierarchy, there are moments – handled with unusual restraint by Ranveer Singh – where it is unclear whether Hamza is performing Jaskirat’s mission or whether Jaskirat has become, in some genuine sense, Hamza.
The death of Rehman Dakait (Akshaye Khanna in the performance that won the film its widest critical praise) is this ambiguity’s most extreme test. Rehman is Hamza’s patron, his criminal father figure, the man whose trust Hamza cultivated over years of genuine loyalty. Eliminating Rehman is the mission’s requirement. It is also the betrayal of the closest thing Hamza has to a personal relationship in Karachi. The film handles this not with action-movie bravado but with a violence that feels genuinely costly – Hamza does not walk away from Rehman’s death unchanged.
The ending of the first film establishes the sequel’s central problem precisely. Jaskirat Singh Rangi has won. The criminal apparatus is dismantled. Rehman is dead. But the mission is not complete – Major Iqbal and the ISI network that connected the Lyari underworld to Pakistani state terrorism are still operational, and the specific target of the 26/11 avenging mission, Majo, is still alive. Hamza must remain. Jaskirat must wait longer. The man who is both of them cannot yet choose which one to be.
What the Trailer Promises
The trailer for The Revenge opens with Lyari in chaos. Rehman’s face spray-painted on walls throughout the neighborhood with “Zinda Hai” – He Lives – is the environment of the sequel’s opening: a world where the power vacuum that Hamza created is itself becoming the new threat. Multiple factions move to fill the space Rehman occupied. Major Iqbal, now the film’s primary antagonist rather than the lurking presence he was in the first film, operates from a position of greater power and greater desperation.
The trailer’s most discussed moment is the sequence in which Yalina is shown holding a gun with the shredded Indian passport behind her. The fan reading – confirmed by at least one close analysis article – is that she has discovered Hamza’s true identity. This discovery, if it occurs early in the film, transforms the second half’s emotional architecture entirely. Yalina is not simply the agent’s wife waiting for his safe return. She is now a character with potentially lethal knowledge of a covert operation, in the capital of a hostile state, in the middle of a gang war, married to a man she may feel she has never actually known.
The trailer also introduces, via a brief flashback sequence, the making of Jaskirat as a spy – his training, his indoctrination into the logic of Operation Dhurandhar, and crucially, a figure in the background of the Para SF training sequence whose voice reportedly sounds like Vicky Kaushal’s Major Vihaan Singh Shergill from Uri: The Surgical Strike. If this connection is deliberate – and in Aditya Dhar’s filmography, very few things are accidental – it would mean that the Dhurandhar duology is not merely a standalone story but the founding chapter of a shared fictional universe of Indian covert operations, with Uri operating in the same continuity several years later.
The car number plate ending in “2611” in the Dubai sequence is the trailer’s simplest and most emotionally direct signal: the avenging of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks is the mission’s ultimate justification. Whatever Hamza has done, whatever Jaskirat has sacrificed, whatever Yalina has been subjected to in a marriage to a ghost – all of it is positioned against the weight of the 166 lives lost in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the Lashkar-e-Taiba operation that the film fictionalizes as something Indian intelligence has been trying to avenge through Operation Dhurandhar for nearly two decades.
The Real History Behind the Fiction
Dhurandhar draws on documented historical events and real figures with a specificity that distinguishes it from typical Bollywood nationalism. The 1999 IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks: these are not merely backdrop. They are the moral architecture of the mission. Operation Lyari, the real Pakistani government crackdown on Lyari’s criminal syndicates, is the historical framework around which the fictional Operation Dhurandhar is constructed.
Rehman Dakait is based on the real gangster Arshad Pappu, who led the Peoples Amn Committee in Lyari before his death in 2013. SP Chaudhary Aslam’s character is based on the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan, the Karachi police officer known as the “Terror Cop” who was killed by a Taliban suicide bomb in 2014. Major Iqbal in the sequel is based partly on Ilyas Kashmiri, the Pakistani soldier-turned-terrorist-turned-Al Qaeda operative who was killed in a drone strike in 2011, and partly on Major Iqbal, the ISI officer indicted in the United States for his role in financing the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
This historical grounding creates specific constraints on the alternative endings available to the film. The real events had outcomes. The real figures had fates. The film has been careful, throughout, to remain legally distinct from specific real individuals while clearly drawing on their stories. The alternative endings must navigate this constraint: they can imagine different fictional outcomes for Hamza and Jaskirat, but the historical events – the Mumbai attacks, the eventual deaths of Rehman Dakait’s real-world equivalents – are fixed.
Part Two: Seven Alternative Endings
Alternative Ending One: Hamza Completes the Mission and Comes Home as Jaskirat
The most straightforward alternative is the one that the genre – and the film’s patriotic positioning – most naturally points toward. Hamza eliminates Majo, completes the 26/11 avenging mission, dismantles the ISI-underworld nexus, and is extracted by Ajay Sanyal’s team. He returns to India. He reclaims his identity as Jaskirat Singh Rangi. He is quietly reinstated, his death-row conviction officially expunged, his sacrifice acknowledged in the private way that covert operations are acknowledged – no ceremony, no medal, no public recognition, just a handshake in a room that does not appear in any official record.
This ending is the one that the film’s marketing is most carefully avoiding. The trailer does not show Hamza returning to India. It does not show Jaskirat Singh Rangi at home in Punjab. It shows the Dubai sequence, the Lyari streets, the confrontation with Major Iqbal, the shattered mirror, the gun in Yalina’s hand. The marketing is telling the audience that the resolution will not be clean, that the homecoming – if it comes – will be complicated by what happened before it.
But the alternative ending where the homecoming is clean is worth examining precisely because of what it would cost the film’s argument. A Hamza who completes the mission and returns to India as Jaskirat has been redeemed by the state. The state that condemned him to death has now used his skills, his body, his decade of lost life, and has repaid him with his own identity restored. Whether this constitutes justice, or merely a more elaborate form of exploitation, is a question that the clean homecoming ending does not force the audience to sit with.
The version of this alternative that is most honest about its own costs shows Jaskirat returning to Punjab to find that the decade has not stood still while he was away. His family has mourned him, adjusted to his absence, built lives without him. He is not only returning from Karachi; he is returning from the dead. The welcome is real and the estrangement is real, and they coexist in the specific way that things coexist when a man comes back from a place he cannot explain to people he loves.
This ending is available to the film. It would be deeply satisfying to a certain segment of the audience – the segment that wants to see Ranveer Singh’s Jaskirat walk back into sunlight after a decade of Karachi’s dark. It would also be, in terms of what the duology is most interestingly exploring, slightly evasive. The truly difficult question is not whether Jaskirat can come home but whether the man who lived as Hamza for ten years is the same man who left as Jaskirat. The clean homecoming answer – yes, he is, the mission is complete, Jaskirat has won – forecloses the question that the films have been most carefully building.
Alternative Ending Two: Yalina Becomes an Accomplice
The shredded Indian passport tells us that Yalina knows, or is about to know, that her husband is an Indian spy. The conventional spy-thriller handling of this discovery would be Yalina becoming a threat – either through betrayal to Major Iqbal’s ISI contacts, which would make her a villain, or through a desperate attempt to survive the knowledge by destroying its source. The trailer image of Yalina holding the gun suggests, at minimum, that she is not passively receiving this information.
But the alternative ending in which Yalina becomes an accomplice rather than an antagonist is the one that would most radically reframe the duology’s emotional logic. In this alternative, Yalina – who the first film established as a woman who has navigated a lifetime of Karachi’s violence, as the daughter of a politician whose influence rests on his relationship with men who settle arguments with weapons – receives the information about Hamza’s true identity and makes a choice the ISI does not expect and Major Iqbal cannot plan for: she chooses the man over the country, and in doing so, she places herself in direct opposition to the machinery that Hamza has been serving.
This is not a simple choice in the film’s geography. Yalina is Pakistani. Her father is a Pakistani politician. Her community, her language, her entire social existence is Pakistani. The man she married is an Indian intelligence operative who arranged that marriage as a strategic cover. By any national-loyalty logic, she should betray him. The alternative ending in which she does not, in which she understands that the marriage – however it began – contained something real, and that she is more loyal to the reality of the man than to the nationality that defines him, is an ending that the duology’s most nationalistically charged marketing has absolutely not prepared the audience for.
But it is available in the films’ internal logic. The first film took genuine care with Yalina as a character. She is not merely the love interest placed beside the protagonist for warmth. She is observant, she is intelligent, she has survived in an environment that does not reward naivety. If Yalina has spent years watching Hamza and has had, before the discovery of the passport, her own unspoken doubts about who he is, her choice to become his accomplice rather than his betrayer would be not a betrayal of characterization but its fulfillment.
The ending in which Yalina is an accomplice does not need to be triumphant. She and Hamza – or Hamza and Jaskirat – do not need to escape together into a sunset. The most dramatically honest version of this alternative is one in which Yalina’s choice comes too late or costs too much: she provides the cover, the warning, the last piece of information that allows Hamza to complete the mission, but her own exposure in doing so makes their return together impossible. She knows too much to remain safely in Pakistan. She is not Indian and cannot simply be extracted to India. She is the spy’s wife in the most literal sense – a person whose life has been defined by a secret she did not choose and cannot now unknow.
Alternative Ending Three: Major Iqbal Exposes Hamza to Lyari
The conventional spy-thriller danger is exposure to the state – to the intelligence apparatus of the country the operative is working against. In Dhurandhar: The Revenge, this danger is embodied by Major Iqbal, the ISI officer who is closing in on Hamza from above. But Hamza’s position in Lyari creates a second and arguably more immediately lethal danger: exposure to the criminal community he has embedded himself in.
The alternative ending in which Major Iqbal, calculating that Hamza is more useful dead than captured – and that exposing him to Lyari’s gang leaders will achieve that death without leaving ISI fingerprints – leaks Hamza’s true identity to Uzair Baloch and the other factions fighting for Lyari’s post-Rehman power vacuum, is the ending that most directly tests what Hamza has built in Karachi.
Because Hamza, at the end of the first film, is not simply a spy in a hostile city. He is a man who has earned genuine loyalty from specific people in Lyari – not from everyone, not uniformly, but from the subset of the community that came to know him as Hamza Ali Mazari the operator, the man who kept his word even when he did not have to, who protected certain people within the community even when the mission did not require it. Mohammed Aalam, his handler, whose juice shop cover is the one entirely genuine friendship the film gives Hamza, is the most obvious representative of this category.
In the alternative ending where Major Iqbal exposes Hamza’s identity to Lyari’s gangs, the confrontation becomes not Jaskirat versus the ISI but Hamza versus his own decade of relationship-building. The question the exposure forces is: who in Lyari knew, on some level, that something about Hamza was not fully what it seemed, and chose to overlook it because the man’s actions within the community were consistent and valuable? The answer to this question determines who helps Hamza and who hunts him.
This alternative is the most structurally interesting precisely because it removes the clean division between state and criminal, Indian and Pakistani, spy and community. In the community-exposure scenario, the final confrontation is not between Hamza and the ISI. It is between Hamza and the consequences of his own decisions over a decade – the people he deceived who feel only betrayal, and the people he protected who feel, if not exactly loyalty, at least a debt that the revelation of his identity does not automatically cancel.
The ending in which Major Iqbal exposes Hamza and the exposure fails – in which Lyari’s community, or the specific part of it that Hamza protected, chooses the man over the nationality – would be the most genuinely complex political statement the film could make. It would be saying that human loyalty is harder to destroy than geopolitical logic predicts, that what you do in a community matters more than what passport defines you, and that India’s intelligence services were right to bet on a man who understood this. It would also be, for obvious reasons, a more complicated statement for a film positioned in the Indian market as a nationalist triumph. Whether Aditya Dhar is willing to go there is one of the seven days’ most interesting questions.
Alternative Ending Four: Hamza Kills Major Iqbal but Does Not Complete the Mission
The structural logic of the 26/11 avenging narrative – the mission’s stated purpose since the first film’s prologue – demands that Majo, the figure representing the 26/11 planners, be eliminated by Hamza at the film’s climax. The title The Revenge makes this promise explicit. The audience is positioned, by the marketing and by the first film’s emotional architecture, to expect this elimination as the duology’s cathartic resolution.
The alternative ending in which Hamza eliminates Major Iqbal but does not complete the mission’s stated objective regarding Majo – in which the revenge of the title refers to a personal revenge that substitutes for the national one, because the national objective proves either unreachable or unnecessary by the time the personal confrontation is finished – is the ending that most directly challenges the film’s relationship to its historical inspiration.
This alternative requires understanding that the real-world figures the film fictionalizes were not eliminated by a single covert operation. The real ISI network behind the Mumbai attacks is not dismantled. The real perpetrators were prosecuted with enormous difficulty and incomplete results in Pakistani courts. The real revenge, to whatever extent it occurred, happened through a combination of diplomatic pressure, drone strikes, intelligence sharing, and the grinding work of international law enforcement rather than through a single operative’s completed mission.
The film has chosen, deliberately, to tell a story in which the individual operative’s mission can be completed – in which Jaskirat Singh Rangi can be the instrument of a national accounting, in which one man’s sacrifice can encompass and represent the meaning of a national trauma. This choice is the film’s most artistically convenient and historically most tenuous decision.
The alternative ending in which the mission is not completed – in which Hamza eliminates Major Iqbal, the most personal threat to his survival and the most immediate obstacle in his path, but is extracted before reaching Majo, or in which Majo escapes, or in which the operational circumstances change so completely that the original objective becomes irrelevant – is the ending closest to what actually happens in covert operations. It is the ending of a spy thriller that takes the “thriller” seriously and the “spy” even more seriously. It is not the ending that sells a film to 150 million people.
But it is the ending that most honestly reflects the real relationship between individual covert sacrifice and national outcomes. The real Jaskirat Singh Rangis of India’s intelligence apparatus – the men who have given years and identity and personal history to operations that will never be officially acknowledged – have not, in most cases, arrived at tidy closures. They have arrived at extraction points, at cover changes, at the next assignment or the quiet pension if they are lucky, with the operation’s ultimate objectives still pending review. The alternative ending in which the personal revenge succeeds and the national mission does not is the ending that honors those real men more honestly than the one where everything clicks into place.
Alternative Ending Five: Jaskirat Is Disavowed
The disavowal ending is one of the most durable conventions of the spy-thriller genre, and it arrives in Dhurandhar: The Revenge with specific local weight that it would not have in a Western equivalent. The convention says: when an operation goes wrong, or when its continued acknowledgment becomes politically inconvenient, the state withdraws its protection and leaves the operative to survive – or not – on his own resources.
The specific form this disavowal would take in the Dhurandhar universe is tied to the film’s relationship to real diplomatic circumstances. The first film was banned in Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Its line about the Baloch was legally challenged. The film’s version of Pakistan’s political landscape – naming characters based on real ISI officers, real Pakistani presidents, real terrorist operatives – has already generated enough diplomatic sensitivity that its creators navigated formal objections before release. A sequel that concludes with the Indian state officially backing its operative in Karachi might generate further complications.
More dramatically, the disavowal ending in the Dhurandhar universe would engage with something the first film established and the sequel’s trailer amplifies: Ajay Sanyal is not simply Hamza’s handler. He is the architect and ongoing manager of an operation that has consumed a man’s identity for a decade. The relationship between Sanyal and Hamza – or Sanyal and Jaskirat – contains a power asymmetry that the film’s patriotic framing has been careful not to examine too closely. Sanyal recruited a death-row inmate, effectively offering him life in exchange for the surrender of that life to a mission. The moral character of this exchange is more complicated than the film’s first installment was interested in investigating.
In the alternative ending where Sanyal disavows Hamza – where Ajay Sanyal’s calculation of India’s diplomatic interests, or his own political survival, or simply the mission’s completion renders Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s continued existence more problematic than his elimination – the film would be forced to examine this power asymmetry directly. Hamza, in this ending, discovers that the Indian state’s commitment to him was always conditional. He was recruited from death row; the state’s default position was always that he was expendable. Operation Dhurandhar used him and, when the use was complete, the state’s preference is not for his extraction but for his silence.
The political courage this ending would require of Aditya Dhar is significant. He is the director of Uri: The Surgical Strike, a film that became a kind of unofficial national celebration of Indian military valor. His audience, his market, his relationship to the national mood that made Dhurandhar the highest-grossing Hindi film in history: all of these push against the ending in which the Indian state abandons its operative. And yet the disavowal ending is the one that would make the duology genuinely important rather than merely enormously successful. It would be the ending that says: the man who dies for his country deserves to know that his country will not always die for him.
Alternative Ending Six: Hamza Chooses Pakistan
This is the alternative that no mainstream reading of the marketing, the genre conventions, or the film’s evident patriotic positioning would predict, and it is therefore, as an analytical thought experiment, the most revealing.
The first film took significant care to show that Hamza’s decade in Karachi was not purely instrumental. He genuinely came to understand the Lyari community – its specific poverty, its specific dignity, its specific forms of solidarity and violence that were produced by specific historical circumstances rather than any essential quality of its people. He married Yalina and the marriage, however strategically motivated, was not without warmth. He dealt with Mohammed Aalam as a handler but also, it is suggested, as something closer to a friend. He protected people in Lyari who had no strategic value to the mission. He did things, in other words, that Jaskirat Singh Rangi the Indian operative was not required to do, and that Hamza Ali Mazari the human being chose to do.
The alternative ending in which Hamza, confronted with the completion of the mission and the possibility of extraction, chooses to remain – not as a spy, not as an operative, but as the man he became in Karachi – is the alternative that takes this characterization at its word. It says: the person who lived in Lyari for ten years is not simply Jaskirat Singh Rangi wearing a Hamza costume. He is genuinely both. And when he is forced to choose, the choice is not obvious.
This alternative is not a betrayal narrative. Hamza choosing Pakistan does not mean Jaskirat betraying India. It means a man who has been two people for a decade choosing the self that has been built by ten years of lived experience over the self that was formed by twenty years of previous history. The question it raises – which is the real self, the one you were born as or the one you have lived as? – is a question that the spy-thriller genre is usually too committed to its patriotic resolution to ask seriously.
The most dramatically complex version of this alternative does not require Hamza to renounce his Indian identity or to actively work against Indian interests. It requires him to refuse extraction. It requires him to stay in Lyari, not as a spy and not as a gangster, but as the man the community knows – the man who can operate in this specific geography in ways that neither the Indian state nor the Pakistani state fully controls. It is the ending of a film that has spent two installments building toward a recognition that the most interesting human beings are the ones who cannot be fully claimed by any flag.
Whether this alternative is available to a film that made 1,304 crore rupees partly on the strength of its nationalist positioning is a genuinely interesting commercial and artistic question. It is probably not available to the film Aditya Dhar made. It is available to the film that the most interesting aspects of his script seemed to be reaching toward, before the demands of the blockbuster format and the national mood redirected it.
Alternative Ending Seven: Hamza Dies, but Jaskirat Survives
The most thematically precise alternative, and the one that the film’s central question most directly demands, is the ending in which the person who dies in the operation’s completion is not Jaskirat Singh Rangi but Hamza Ali Mazari. The body survives. The cover identity does not.
This alternative requires understanding that Hamza and Jaskirat, by the end of a decade of total immersion, are not simply one person with two names. They are two genuinely distinct psychological formations inhabiting the same body. Jaskirat Singh Rangi existed before the mission. He had a history, a family, a set of experiences that formed him. Hamza Ali Mazari was constructed during the mission, but the construction was so total and so long that he has his own formed qualities – his own instincts, his own relationships, his own moral vocabulary shaped by Lyari rather than Punjab.
The ending in which the operation’s completion requires the death of Hamza – not physically, but psychologically, the deliberate dismantling of the Karachi identity that allowed the mission to function – is the ending that is most honest about what the Indian state actually asked of Jaskirat Singh Rangi. It asked him not merely to risk his life. It asked him to replace his life with another life, so completely that the replacement becomes the primary reality. The completion of the mission means undoing that replacement. And undoing it is not simply returning to the self that existed before; that self is not waiting, unchanged, for the return. That self has been absent for ten years. The world has moved. Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s original life is now the cover story, and Hamza Ali Mazari is the reality.
In this alternative, the operation ends successfully. Majo is eliminated. Major Iqbal is neutralized. The ISI-underworld nexus is dismantled. Jaskirat Singh Rangi is extracted to India. But the man who walks off the extraction vehicle in Delhi is not quite either of the people he has been. He is the residue of the collision between two identities, carrying both and being fully neither. Hamza – the relationships, the instincts, the decade of experience – is dead in the sense that the life is ended. Jaskirat is alive but alienated, returned to a country and an identity that no longer fully fits.
This is the ending that the film’s title, The Revenge, would most fully justify. The revenge is not only against the 26/11 attackers. It is the revenge that Hamza takes on the Jaskirat who was forced to disappear, and that Jaskirat takes on the decade that was stolen from him, by being simultaneously successful and irrecoverably altered. The mission is won. The man who won it is the casualty.
Part Three: What the Alternatives Reveal About the Duology’s Central Argument
The Question of Identity as the Real Subject
Seven alternative endings, and the pattern they reveal is not about spy thrillers or Pakistani underworlds or 26/11 avenging. The pattern they reveal is about identity: specifically, about whether identity is something you have or something you do, whether the person formed by ten years of total commitment to a role is less real than the person who existed before the role was adopted.
Dhurandhar and The Revenge are, beneath their enormous action-movie surfaces, a two-part meditation on this question. Ranveer Singh’s performance in the first film – which critics across the ideological spectrum agreed was among his finest work – was most praised for exactly the moments where the question of who Hamza/Jaskirat actually is became genuinely uncertain. When Hamza argues for protecting a Lyari neighbourhood from gang violence that serves no operational purpose, is he performing compassion for cover, or is he expressing a genuine moral position that the man formed by Karachi’s streets has developed? The film does not resolve this. It holds the uncertainty as the most interesting thing it has to offer.
The alternative endings we have explored each take a different position on this question. The alternative where Jaskirat comes home cleanly says: the self formed before the mission is the real one; the mission was always just a role. The alternative where Hamza chooses Pakistan says: the self formed by the mission is more real than the one that preceded it; the mission was not a role but a becoming. The alternative where Hamza dies and Jaskirat survives says: both selves are real, and the collision between them is what the operation actually produced, regardless of what the mission reports will say.
Aditya Dhar, as a filmmaker, has shown in Uri that he is capable of simple and stirring patriotic resolution. He has shown in Dhurandhar that he is capable of something more complicated. Which version of himself shows up in The Revenge is the question that will determine whether this duology is remembered as the most commercially successful Indian spy film franchise or as something genuinely artistically significant.
The Yalina Question as the Duology’s Moral Test
Yalina is the duology’s most underdeveloped and most potentially significant character. The first film gave her warmth, presence, and the specific kind of intelligence that women who have grown up in dangerous environments develop as a survival skill. But it did not fully develop her as an autonomous character with her own moral framework. She was Hamza’s wife and Jameel’s daughter and the presence that gave Hamza’s Karachi life its most human texture. Her own view of her marriage, her own reading of Hamza’s occasional moments of unguarded honesty, her own calculation of risk and loyalty: the first film left all of this largely unexplored.
The sequel cannot do the same. The shredded Indian passport has put Yalina at the center of the moral architecture. What she does with the knowledge of who Hamza is will be the film’s moral test – not for Hamza, but for the duology’s argument about what loyalty means and who gets to claim it.
Each of the alternative endings we examined positions Yalina differently. In the accomplice alternative, she chooses the man over the nation. In the disavowal alternative, she is the collateral damage of the state’s decision to abandon its operative. In the exposure alternative, she is the variable that Major Iqbal cannot fully control because human loyalty is harder to predict than operational security. In the Hamza-chooses-Pakistan alternative, she is potentially the reason – or one of the reasons – that the choice is available to Hamza at all.
The alternative endings collectively reveal that Yalina’s choice is the film’s most important unexplored territory. Whatever Aditya Dhar does with her in the sequel’s resolution will determine whether The Revenge is ultimately a film about a man completing a mission or a film about what it costs to live – genuinely live, as opposed to operating – in the middle of someone else’s war.
The 26/11 Revenge Narrative and Its Complications
The film is positioned, in its marketing and its emotional architecture, as an avenging of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. This positioning is commercially effective and emotionally powerful. The attacks killed 166 people over four days. The grief and anger they generated in India – and among India’s diaspora globally – have not diminished in the seventeen years since. A film that positions its hero as the instrument of justice for that grief is speaking to something real and deep.
But the alternative endings reveal the complications in this narrative that the film’s marketing has smoothed over. The real perpetrators of the 2008 attacks were not eliminated by a covert operation. Lashkar-e-Taiba continues to operate, with modified structures, under Pakistani state protection. The trial of the attacks’ planners in Pakistani courts has proceeded with glacial slowness and incomplete accountability. The revenge that the film promises has not occurred in reality, and the promise itself – that a single operative’s decade of sacrifice can deliver it – is the kind of promise that works in cinema and fails as a description of how intelligence operations actually function.
The alternative endings that refuse this promise – the ending where the mission is incomplete, the ending where Hamza is disavowed, the ending where Jaskirat comes home and the geopolitical situation is unchanged – are the endings that take the historical context more seriously. They are not comfortable endings. They are not the endings that send audiences out of the theatre with the specific uplift that Uri provided and that Dhurandhar has been marketed as delivering.
But they are, in a sense, the endings that honor the real covert operatives whose sacrifice the film is simultaneously celebrating and fictionalizing. The real men who have done what Jaskirat Singh Rangi does in this film have not been delivered the tidy resolution of a completed mission and a safe extraction. They have been delivered the ongoing condition of people who know things that cannot be publicly said and have done things that cannot be publicly acknowledged, in service of a national interest that is real but whose specific victories cannot be verified.
Part Four: The Film Aditya Dhar Made and the Film He Might Have Made
The Uri Precedent
Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) established Aditya Dhar’s filmmaking signature: a meticulous reconstruction of a specific operation, told with emotional directness and patriotic conviction, culminating in a cathartic moment that sends the audience out with an energy that is simultaneously grief and pride. The film’s final question – “How’s the josh?” – became a cultural phrase that outlasted the film’s run by years. Dhar understood that the resolution of a patriotic spy narrative needs to deliver an emotional state, not just a plot conclusion.
The Dhurandhar duology is a more ambitious and more complicated project than Uri. It spans a decade rather than a surgical strike’s tight timeline. Its protagonist lives in moral ambiguity rather than military clarity. Its world – Karachi’s criminal underworld, the ISI’s political manipulation of gangsters, the dirty overlap between state and crime – is not the clean military hierarchy of Uri’s Vihaan Singh Shergill and his Para SF unit.
The precedent Uri sets for The Revenge’s resolution is both an asset and a constraint. The audience that was formed by Uri’s emotional cadence expects something comparable – a moment of patriotic catharsis, a declaration that the sacrifice was worth it, a victory that can be felt even if it cannot be openly celebrated. The alternative endings that refuse this cadence are available to Dhar as a filmmaker but not, straightforwardly, to him as the director of the highest-grossing Hindi film in history whose sequel carries enormous commercial expectations.
The question is whether Dhar, having made the film he needed to make commercially with the first installment, has used the sequel to say something harder. The trailer’s most ambiguous frames – the shattered mirror, Yalina’s gun, the Dubai sequence with the “2611” plate – suggest that he has at least tried. Whether the resolution honors that ambiguity or resolves it into the Uri cadence will be known on March 19.
The Ranveer Singh Factor
Ranveer Singh’s casting in this role was, when announced, a genuine artistic risk. His public persona – the extrovert, the showman, the color and noise of his offscreen presence – seemed antithetical to the requirements of a deep-cover operative whose survival depends on the suppression of exactly those qualities. The first film demonstrated that the mismatch was, in fact, the point. The performance Ranveer Singh gave as Hamza was the performance of a man suppressing, continuously and with great effort, the most Ranveer Singh parts of himself. The exhaustion of that suppression was visible in the performance. It made Hamza’s occasional moments of dangerous impulsiveness – the flashes where Jaskirat’s personality broke through the Hamza surface – feel genuinely costly rather than merely dramatic.
The alternative endings have different implications for what Ranveer Singh’s performance in the sequel would need to deliver. The clean homecoming alternative requires a final scene of release – the suppression finally over, the mask finally off, the performance of Ranveer Singh not performing. The Hamza-chooses-Pakistan alternative requires the opposite: the decision not to remove the mask, which is itself a removal of a different kind. The ending where Hamza dies and Jaskirat survives requires the film’s most technically demanding performance: a man who has lost a self, registering that loss while physically intact.
The alternative endings are, in part, a way of asking which of these Ranveer Singh the actor is most capable of delivering, and which Aditya Dhar the director has chosen to demand of him. The answer will be visible in March 19’s opening scenes before the critical consensus has had time to form.
Part Five: The Spy-Verse Question
The Vicky Kaushal Connection
The trailer detail that has generated the most speculation among serious viewers is the Para SF training sequence in which the commanding officer’s voice reportedly resembles Vicky Kaushal’s Major Vihaan Singh Shergill from Uri. In Uri, Seerat Kaur – Kirti Kulhari’s character – mentions that her late husband was “Captain Jaskirat Singh Rangi, killed in the Naushera sector ambush.” The character never appears onscreen in Uri. He is a name, a dead man, a piece of backstory that explains Seerat Kaur’s grief.
If Aditya Dhar is constructing a continuity in which the Jaskirat of Dhurandhar and the dead Captain Jaskirat of Uri are the same person – or in which the Dhurandhar timeline feeds into the Uri timeline – he is attempting something that mainstream Bollywood has not previously managed: a genuinely shared fictional universe of Indian covert operations, where each film’s events have consequences in the other films’ worlds.
The alternative endings take on a different dimension in the light of this possible continuity. If Jaskirat Singh Rangi of the Dhurandhar duology is the same Jaskirat Singh Rangi who is remembered as dead in Uri, then the ending of The Revenge is constrained by Uri’s backstory. He cannot still be living an acknowledged life in India by the time of Uri’s events. He is dead, or officially dead, or living so far outside the official record that Seerat Kaur – who would have known him in Uri’s timeline – genuinely believes him killed in an ambush.
This continuity constraint makes the clean homecoming alternative nearly impossible, if Dhar is serious about the connection. It makes the disavowal alternative more plausible – a man who is disavowed must, in some sense, stay “dead” even after he survives. It makes the Hamza-chooses-Pakistan alternative both impossible (he cannot remain in Pakistan if he eventually appears, however tangentially, in the Uri universe as a memory in India) and possible (if “choosing Pakistan” means choosing to remain operationally active in a way that never returns him to Indian official existence).
The spy-verse question is the alternative ending question extended across films. It asks not just how The Revenge ends but what it sets up, and whether Aditya Dhar is thinking in franchise terms that extend beyond the duology’s conclusion.
Part Six: The Audiences Who Are Already Writing Their Own Endings
Fan Theory as Alternative Ending
Dhurandhar has generated a fan theory ecosystem that is, by Indian film standards, unusually sophisticated. The Reddit threads, the Twitter analyses, the YouTube breakdown videos that have accumulated in the seven weeks between the trailer’s release and the film’s opening have produced alternative ending scenarios that rival the ones in this article for specificity and inventiveness.
The most widely circulated fan theory posits that Yalina knows, and has known for longer than the passport discovery suggests, that Hamza is not what he presents himself to be. The theory reads her behavior in the first film through a retrospective lens: moments of unusual perceptiveness, of questions that probe just slightly deeper than the situation requires, of a willingness to love a man who holds himself at a certain unmistakable distance even in intimacy. If Yalina has known, or suspected, for years, then the discovery of the passport is not a revelation but a confirmation – and her response is not the shock response of someone betrayed but the decision response of someone who has been waiting for the moment to make a choice.
This fan reading produces its own alternative ending: Yalina has been silently running her own calculation for years, and the choice she has already made – before the passport, before the gun, before the sequel’s events are set in motion – is not to betray him. The alternative ending this produces is the most romantically optimistic of any we have examined, and also, in some respects, the most politically complex: it requires a Pakistani woman to have made a private decision to protect an Indian spy not because she was coerced, not because she was deceived, but because she understood the man inside the cover identity and decided that he was worth protecting.
Another widely circulated theory concerns Mohammed Aalam, Hamza’s handler – Gaurav Gera in a performance the first film gave insufficient space to develop. The theory posits that Aalam’s juice shop cover has been compromised long before the sequel begins, and that the opening movement of The Revenge involves Hamza discovering this compromise and being forced to act as his own handler for the first time, without the communication channel that has been his lifeline to Sanyal in Delhi. This alternative ending is the one that most starkly isolates Hamza – left alone in Karachi with no extraction plan and no operational support, forced to complete the mission on resources that are entirely internal.
The Ending the Critics Want
Critical response to the first film was, across English-language and Hindi-language outlets, genuinely divided in a way that popular reception was not. The film’s enormous commercial success coexisted with reviews that ranged from “the most important Indian film of the decade” to “a glossy celebration of violence and hyper-masculinity without sufficient moral reflection.” The critics who found the first film insufficient were generally missing something specific: an acknowledgment of the cost, in human rather than operational terms, of what Sanyal’s operation required of Jaskirat.
The ending that this critical community wants from The Revenge is the one that refuses the catharsis – that acknowledges, explicitly and without the surrounding uplift of a patriotic action climax, that what was done to Jaskirat Singh Rangi in the name of Operation Dhurandhar was not a straightforward gift of life in exchange for service. It was the appropriation of a life, carried out with sufficient skill and at sufficient scale that the appropriation looks, from the outside, like heroism.
This ending is the disavowal alternative pushed to its furthest point: not only does the state abandon Jaskirat, but the film itself abandons the state’s framing and looks at the operation from the operative’s position, asking whether the decade of sacrifice, the destroyed identity, the marriage built on deception, and the accumulated moral costs of Karachi were things that Jaskirat Singh Rangi chose or things that were chosen for him by a man in Delhi who calculated, correctly, that a death-row inmate had nothing to bargain with.
Part Seven: Seven Days Before the Answer
What We Know for Certain
As of March 12, 2026 – exactly one week before Dhurandhar: The Revenge opens in theatres – the following things are known. The film will run approximately 3 hours and 30 minutes. Ranveer Singh will appear as both Hamza Ali Mazari and Jaskirat Singh Rangi. The primary antagonist is Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), based on real Pakistani ISI figures. Yalina (Sara Arjun) will play a significantly expanded and more confrontational role than she did in the first film. Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan) will appear in his strategic mastermind role. The film will deal directly with the 26/11 Mumbai attacks as its primary moral justification. It will release in five languages. It is directed by Aditya Dhar, who is also a co-producer and the screenplay’s author.
Principal photography for the sequel took place between July 2024 and October 2025, with additional shooting in January and February 2026. The trailer reveals Ranveer Singh returning with dual avatars – Jaskirat Singh Rangi and Hamza – and features expanded character arcs for R. Madhavan as strategic mastermind Ajay Sanyal and Arjun Rampal as ISI Major Iqbal.
The official logline establishes that as rival gangs, corrupt officials, and a ruthless Major Iqbal close in, Hamza’s mission spirals into a bloody personal war where the line between patriot and monster disappears in the streets of Lyari.
That line – “the line between patriot and monster disappears” – is the clearest signal we have from Aditya Dhar about the ending he has in mind. It suggests that the resolution will not be clean, will not fully spare the audience the discomfort of what the operation required, and will take seriously the possibility that the man who emerges from Lyari having completed the mission is not identical to either the man who entered it or the man he was before it.
What the Alternatives Have Illuminated
The seven alternative endings we have explored are not predictions. They are instruments of understanding. They have revealed that the duology’s central question – who is Hamza/Jaskirat, and which of his identities is the real one – cannot be answered by the mission’s completion alone. The mission’s completion is one resolution among several, and the most artistically interesting aspect of Aditya Dhar’s project is that the other resolutions remain imaginable even now, one week before the answer is given.
They have revealed that Yalina is the duology’s moral center, however much the marketing has foregrounded Ranveer Singh’s physical and emotional dominance. What she does with the information she has found will determine what kind of film this is, and what kind of argument about loyalty and nationality it has been making all along.
They have revealed that the relationship between the personal revenge – Hamza against Major Iqbal, the man who threatened his survival – and the national revenge – Jaskirat against the planners of 26/11, the mission’s original mandate – is not necessarily the same relationship the film’s marketing has suggested. The personal may be completed without the national, or the national may be completed without the personal feeling resolved.
They have revealed that the film’s positioning in the market – as the triumphant sequel to the highest-grossing Hindi film in history – is in tension with the most interesting things the first film built into its protagonist’s psychology. Commercial success on this scale creates specific pressures toward certain kinds of resolutions and away from others. Whether Aditya Dhar has bent to those pressures or found a way to satisfy the commercial requirement while preserving the artistic one is, ultimately, the question that makes the countdown to March 19 feel like something more than routine anticipation.
Part Eight: The Weight of Real Events and the License of Fiction
What Operation Dhurandhar Borrows and What It Invents
One of the most distinctive qualities of the Dhurandhar duology is the precision with which it positions itself on the boundary between documented history and invented fiction. The film names real events – IC-814, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks – as the moral justification for Operation Dhurandhar. It populates its world with characters clearly based on real individuals: Rehman Dakait on Arshad Pappu, SP Chaudhary Aslam on the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan, Major Iqbal on the ISI officer indicted in the 2008 Mumbai attack investigation and on Ilyas Kashmiri. It draws the operational geography of Lyari with enough specificity that Pakistani audiences who illegally downloaded the film reportedly recognized its texture.
And yet the operation itself – the decade-long embedding of an Indian intelligence operative in the Lyari criminal hierarchy – is fictional. India’s intelligence services have never officially acknowledged any such operation. The real death of the 1999 hijacker Zahoor Mistry, which the film’s research consultant Aditya Raj Kaul documented, may have involved Indian involvement, but no operation of the scale and duration depicted in the film has been confirmed.
This positioning matters for the alternative endings because it determines what the film is allowed to claim. A film set in the 2008 Mumbai attacks’ aftermath is not free to invent outcomes for those attacks; it must engage with the reality that the attacks’ primary planners have not been brought to justice in any form that Indian families of the victims would recognize as adequate. But a film whose central operation is invented can resolve the invented operation however it chooses. The tension between these two levels – the real events that anchor the moral weight, and the invented operation that provides the narrative through-line – is the tension from which all seven alternative endings draw their energy.
The alternative ending where the mission is not completed is the one most faithful to the real historical record: the 26/11 planners have not been brought to justice through covert operations. The alternative ending where Hamza eliminates Majo and the mission is triumphantly completed is the one most faithful to the film’s emotional promise. Between these two poles, the other alternatives find their positions – some closer to the historical reality, some closer to the genre promise, all of them in contact with both.
The Lyari Geography as Moral Landscape
The specific choice of Lyari as the film’s operational geography is the Dhurandhar duology’s most distinctive and most underanalyzed decision. Lyari is not simply a convenient Karachi neighborhood for a film about Pakistani gangsters. It is, in the real history that the film draws on, one of the most politically complex urban spaces in South Asia – a working-class Baloch-majority neighborhood in the capital of Sindh province that has been simultaneously a stronghold of left-wing political organization, a base for criminal networks with state-level connections, and a community with its own internal solidarity that has resisted both state violence and gang predation in ways that do not fit neatly into narratives of simple criminality.
The real Operation Lyari – the 2013 Pakistani military-police crackdown on the People’s Amn Committee, which was built on the criminal network that the film fictionalizes around Rehman Dakait – was brutal and contested. The real Chaudhry Aslam Khan, on whom Sanjay Dutt’s SP Aslam is based, was a genuinely controversial figure: celebrated by some as the police officer who stood against the gangs, condemned by others for encounter killings and the use of state violence that mirrored the criminal violence it was nominally directed against. His death in a Taliban suicide bombing in 2014 was mourned and also, in some quarters, treated as a form of justice.
The Dhurandhar films inherit this complexity without fully inhabiting it. They use Lyari as a moral landscape – as a space where the right actions are genuinely uncertain, where loyalty and betrayal are genuinely ambiguous, where the distinction between the man enforcing order and the man disrupting it is not always visible from inside the community’s experience. The alternative endings we have explored are shaped by this moral landscape: the ending where Lyari’s community protects Hamza against the ISI’s exposure, the ending where Yalina’s knowledge of the community gives her a different calculus than pure Pakistani nationalism would provide, the ending where Hamza’s decade of human connection to Lyari people is the thing that cannot be erased by the extraction.
The geography is not incidental. The film is set in Lyari because Lyari is the kind of place where the question of who is a patriot and who is a monster genuinely does not have a single answer. The alternative endings are, at their most serious, different answers to the question of what Lyari’s moral landscape demands of the people who have lived in it.
The Comparative Framework: Indian Spy Cinema’s Evolution
Dhurandhar: The Revenge arrives into an Indian cinema landscape that has been transformed, in the six years since Uri, by the commercial and cultural success of patriotic action films that take the intelligence services’ perspective as their natural moral position. Raazi (2018), Romeo Akbar Walter (2019), Shershaah (2021), Mission Majnu (2023), Pathaan (2023): each of these films has explored aspects of the covert operative’s experience, and each has made specific choices about where the moral complexity lies and how much of it to display.
Raazi remains the genre’s most artistically serious treatment of its subject precisely because it refuses the patriotic catharsis – it shows an operative who completes her mission and is devastated by what the completion required. The ending of Raazi is not triumphant. It is the ending of a person who did what was asked and cannot put herself back together afterward. It is the alternative ending that the other films in the genre have generally avoided offering.
The alternative endings for The Revenge exist in dialogue with this filmography. The clean homecoming alternative is what most of the genre post-Uri has delivered. The disavowal alternative is what Raazi implied without making explicit. The Hamza-dies-Jaskirat-survives alternative is what the genre has not yet attempted but which its most ambitious works have been approaching.
Whether The Revenge takes the franchise in Raazi’s direction – toward the artistic risk of refusing the patriotic uplift – or consolidates it in the Uri direction of the earned catharsis is the question that will determine this duology’s long-term place in Indian cinema’s history. Commercial success is already guaranteed regardless of the answer. Artistic significance depends on which direction Dhar chose when the script’s most demanding alternatives confronted him.
Part Nine: The Silence That the Mission Requires
What Cannot Be Said When the Mission Is Over
Every covert operative who survives an operation faces a version of the same problem: the experience that defined the most significant years of their life cannot be shared. The people they love most – family, old friends, the world they return to – did not share the experience and cannot be given access to it. The classified designation covers not just operational details but the emotional texture of what was lived. You cannot explain why certain words or smells or angles of light produce specific reactions without explaining what produced those associations, and explaining that would require explaining where you were and what you did, which is what the classification prevents.
This silence is the cost that the alternative endings we explored do not fully account for. The clean homecoming alternative shows Jaskirat returning to India. It does not show what happens when someone at his parents’ dinner table in Punjab asks where he has been. The question cannot be answered honestly. The lies required to answer it are lies to the people he loves most, which means the extraction from one life of deception deposits him into a slightly different life of deception. The forms are less dangerous. The scale is domestic rather than national. The fundamental condition – of knowing things that cannot be shared – is unchanged.
This is the ending that awaits every Jaskirat Singh Rangi regardless of what the mission produces. Whether he eliminates Majo or not, whether he returns with Yalina or alone, whether he is acknowledged by Sanyal or disavowed: the silence follows him. He knows what he knows. The decade in Karachi is a fact about him that will shape everything he does and that the people he does it with cannot be allowed to understand. The closest equivalent in ordinary experience is grief that cannot be explained – the kind of loss that cannot be named in the company where you find yourself, that must be managed privately while the public performance of normalcy continues.
The spy novel genre understands this. John le Carré built his entire body of work around the specific loneliness of the man who knows things he cannot tell. James Ellroy’s American crime fiction is organized around similar silences – things that happened that the participants must carry without the relief of shared acknowledgment. The Indian spy film genre, shaped by the specific national narrative demands of its audience, has been less willing to inhabit this silence. The films tend to end before the silence begins – at the mission’s completion, at the extraction, at the moment of maximum emotional velocity. What comes after is left to the audience’s imagination.
The alternative ending that most honestly engages with this silence is the one where Hamza dies and Jaskirat survives – because in that alternative, the thing that cannot be said is not merely classified but also psychologically inaccessible. Jaskirat cannot share what Hamza experienced because Hamza no longer fully exists to provide the testimony. The silence is not just operational but existential. He carries a decade that died with the cover identity, that belongs to a person he no longer exactly is.
The Majo Question and What It Actually Means
Throughout the analysis of alternative endings, we have treated “Majo” as a clearly defined objective – the target whose elimination will complete Operation Dhurandhar’s 26/11 avenging mandate. But the film’s actual treatment of Majo, in both installments, is more ambiguous than this summary suggests.
Majo is not simply a character who must be eliminated. Majo is the endpoint of a chain of accountability that runs from the 26/11 attacks through Lashkar-e-Taiba through the ISI through Pakistani state policy. Eliminating Majo does not eliminate the chain. It does not prevent the next attack. It does not produce justice in any legal sense that the families of the 26/11 victims could attend and witness and take home as something that addressed their loss.
What Majo’s elimination produces, in the film’s logic, is a statement. It says: this is what India’s intelligence apparatus can reach. This is what crossing a certain line costs. The statement is made privately, in the specific language of covert operations, addressed to the specific community of people who read that language. The general public will not know. The families of the victims will not know. The international community will not know. The statement is a message sent in a code that only the sender and the recipient can read.
This is the reality of what the 26/11 avenging narrative actually looks like if it is taken seriously rather than dramatized. The alternative ending where the mission is not completed is the ending that refuses to pretend that eliminating a single target resolves the moral weight of the event being avenged. The alternative ending where the mission is completed is the ending that says: the statement is sufficient, the moral weight is discharged, the accounting is closed. Whether a statement made privately, in covert-operation code, to people who cannot speak of it, adequately addresses the loss of 166 lives is a question that the film is positioned to ask but perhaps not to answer.
The alternative endings we explored are, at their deepest level, different positions on this question. The ending where the mission succeeds says yes, the statement is sufficient. The ending where the mission is incomplete says no, or says the question cannot be answered. The ending where Hamza dies and Jaskirat survives says something more difficult: that the question may not be the right question, that what matters is not whether the accounting is closed but whether the people who conducted it were treated with the honesty they deserved.
Part Ten: One Week Out – Reading the Signals
What the Re-Release Tells Us
The decision to re-release Dhurandhar worldwide on March 12, 2026 – exactly one week before The Revenge opens – is not simply a commercial decision, though it is certainly that. It is an invitation to see the first film again with the knowledge that the second film is coming, and to notice, in the familiar scenes, things that were planted for the sequel’s resolution.
The scene most worth revisiting with this fresh attention is the one that audiences have discussed least: the quiet conversation between Hamza and Mohammed Aalam in the juice shop, late in the first film, after Rehman’s death has been arranged but before the mission’s next phase has been revealed. Aalam asks Hamza something that the film’s sound design renders partially inaudible in the theatrical cut – a question whose answer Hamza gives in Punjabi, which is Jaskirat’s mother tongue rather than Hamza’s Karachi dialect. The slip is brief and Aalam covers for it without drawing attention. But it is there.
This slip is the first film’s most careful planted signal. It tells us that there are moments when Jaskirat surfaces involuntarily – when the decade of performance has not fully suppressed the original person. It tells us that Mohammed Aalam knows and has always known that the man in the juice shop chair is not entirely who the cover claims him to be, and that Aalam has chosen to protect that knowledge rather than report the crack in the cover to Sanyal. It tells us that the relationship between Hamza and Aalam has a dimension that the mission’s chain of command does not account for.
For the alternative endings, this detail is significant. The ending where Aalam is the mission’s most important casualty – where his cover is the one that is fatally compromised, where his death is what forces Hamza to complete the mission without support – becomes more emotionally precise in the light of this detail. The ending where Aalam survives and Hamza’s last act in Karachi is to ensure that survival before extraction becomes the duology’s most specific act of loyalty. The ending where Aalam is himself an ambiguous figure – not simply a handler, but a Pakistani citizen who has made his own calculation about the value of India’s operation in his community – opens a dimension the first film’s marketing never foregrounded.
The Map That Does Not Stop at Karachi
The trailer’s final frame before the title card – a map of South Asia with a red line drawn from Delhi to Karachi, which then continues beyond Karachi toward the Gulf – has been analyzed as a hint that the film’s conclusion will not confine itself to Lyari’s streets. The line points toward somewhere the action has not yet gone. Some fan analysts have read this as the Dubai sequence’s narrative significance: the “2611” plate is not just a memorial reference but a directional one, pointing toward where the mission’s final act will occur.
If the film ends outside of Karachi – in a third geography, neither India nor Pakistan, in the specific non-national space that Dubai or the Gulf represents – the alternative endings require a different spatial logic. The clean homecoming cannot come directly from Karachi; there must be an intermediate space where the transition happens. The disavowal, if it occurs, occurs in this intermediate space – neither under the Pakistani state’s jurisdiction nor under India’s protection. The Hamza-chooses-Pakistan alternative, if the choice is made in a third country, is actually a choice to remain in the operational underworld rather than return to either state.
The intermediate geography of the Gulf is the alternative ending space that no previous spy film in the Indian genre has used. It is the space of diasporas, of offshore accounts, of transactions that neither state officially sanctions and neither state officially notices. If Aditya Dhar takes his duology’s conclusion there, he is making a claim about where the real business of India-Pakistan covert conflict actually happens – not in the dramatic geography of Lyari streets or Punjab farms but in the gray zone of international finance and stateless operators.
This would be the most sophisticated ending the film’s narrative architecture has been building toward, and it would also require the most trust in an audience that has largely been addressed in the language of straightforward patriotic action. It would be the ending that says: the war that was being fought in Karachi was not really about Karachi. It was about networks that do not respect borders, and the resolution – whatever it is – will not happen inside any border either.
Conclusion: The Intelligence of the Question
The best spy narratives are always about identity before they are about nations. John le Carré’s George Smiley is not interesting because he works for British intelligence; he is interesting because the question of who he is when he is not working for British intelligence is one the novels never fully resolve. The Bourne films are not interesting because Bourne is an assassin; they are interesting because the question of whether the assassin is the real person or the cover for a person who no longer exists is the one they pursue across three films.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge is arriving into this tradition with the specific weight of Indian cinema, Indian history, and Aditya Dhar’s particular brand of patriotically grounded psychological complexity. The seven alternative endings we have explored are seven different answers to the question of who Jaskirat Singh Rangi is after a decade of being Hamza Ali Mazari, in a city that does not know his real name, in service of a country that may or may not acknowledge his sacrifice, married to a woman who may or may not know she is married to a fiction.
Each alternative is a genuine answer. Each produces a different film. The film Aditya Dhar has made will give us one of them, or some combination, or something that these alternatives have not anticipated – because the most interesting films always do something that analysis cannot fully predict, because the specific weight of a performance and a directorial choice and a score and a frame composition creates a meaning that no alternative ending on a page can fully replicate.
What we know, seven days before the answer is given, is that the question is a good one. A film that can generate this many genuine alternative resolutions is a film whose architecture is rich enough to sustain them all. The alternatives exist because the first film built something that required a sequel to complete, and built it carefully enough that the completion was not predetermined by what was built.
Whatever Dhurandhar: The Revenge turns out to be, the question it has been made to answer is this: when the mission is over, who is left? Is it Hamza? Is it Jaskirat? Is it something that the operation produced that has no name yet? And what does the country that made him – or the country that unmade him – owe the answer?
March 19 will tell us. The alternatives tell us what was at stake in the asking.
This article is part of Insight Crunch’s ongoing series on Indian cinema, narrative craft, and the choices that make great films great. We explore not only what great works contain, but what they might have contained – and what the difference between those two things tells us about storytelling, identity, and the stories nations tell about themselves.