The question worth asking about Dhurandhar is not whether it is a better spy thriller than Pathaan. That comparison flatters both and clarifies nothing. The sharper question is whether Dhurandhar is an espionage thriller at all in the sense that Bollywood has spent the last decade teaching audiences to expect. Because if an espionage thriller is a movie where a charismatic agent absorbs bullets, leaps between moving vehicles, and rescues the nation before the interval, then Dhurandhar belongs to a different family of cinema entirely. It wears the costume of the genre. It uses the vocabulary of handlers and cover stories and dead drops. And then it spends nearly three hours dismantling the very thing that makes the Bollywood spy movie pleasurable: the fantasy that a man can give his life to deception and walk away whole.

This is the argument this piece will defend, and it is one no other comparison on the internet makes with conviction. Dhurandhar is not the next step in the evolution of the Bollywood espionage thriller. It is a refusal of the genre’s founding premise. The movies it is repeatedly placed beside, the YRF universe entries built around Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, treat espionage as a stage for invincibility. The agent is a brand. The body is a billboard for the actor’s physique. The mission is an excuse for set pieces. Dhurandhar inverts every one of these assumptions. Its agent is a ghost who has forgotten which face is his own. Its protagonist’s body is not a weapon but a disguise that has fused to the skin. Its mission is not the point; the cost of the mission is the point. The closest relative to Aditya Dhar’s franchise is not Pathaan or Tiger Zinda Hai. It is John le Carre, the British novelist who spent a career arguing that intelligence work is a moral sewer that corrodes the people who do it best.

To make this case honestly, the comparison cannot be a parade of films handled one at a time. Lining up a paragraph on Pathaan, then a paragraph on War, then a paragraph on Tiger teaches the reader nothing except that these movies exist. The comparison has to hold the movies in the same frame at the same moment, examining how each answers the same set of questions. How does each define heroism? What does each do with the human body? What is the viewer asked to feel when a man kills another man? How does each handle the passage of time? Asked this way, the differences stop being matters of budget or star wattage and become differences of philosophy. The YRF films and Dhurandhar are not better and worse versions of the same thing. They are arguments against each other.

There is a richer set of comparisons waiting beyond the obvious blockbusters, and this piece will pursue them because they reveal more than the easy contrast with spectacle cinema. Neeraj Pandey’s Baby took espionage seriously years before Dhurandhar arrived, and its procedural compression throws Dhar’s decade-long timescale into relief. Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi is the comparison that cuts deepest, a movie about an Indian agent who goes undercover in Pakistan, builds real bonds, and discovers the horror of betraying people she has grown to love; Dhurandhar is that story rewritten with a man at its center and ten years where Raazi had months. And beyond the subcontinent sit the Hollywood benchmarks that Indian spy cinema has circled for years without quite reaching: the Bourne pictures, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Zero Dark Thirty. Reading Dhurandhar against all of these is how its real achievement comes into focus. For readers who want to ground the commercial side of this story in numbers, you can explore the franchise’s complete box office journey interactively and see exactly how Dhar’s gamble paid off against the genre it rejected.

The Shared Bloodline That Makes the Comparison Fair

Before arguing that Dhurandhar rejects the Bollywood espionage thriller, it is worth establishing why the two even belong in the same conversation. A comparison only earns its keep when the subjects share enough DNA that their differences mean something. Putting Dhurandhar beside a romantic comedy would be pointless. Putting it beside Pathaan is not, because the two draw water from the same well.

Both descend from a specific lineage in Hindi cinema, one that runs back further than most fans realize. The modern Indian spy picture did not begin with the YRF universe. It begins, arguably, with the patriotic action movies of the 1990s and early 2000s, where the soldier or the secret operative carried the wound of a divided subcontinent in his chest. What changed in the last decade was scale and self-awareness. When Salman Khan slipped into the role of Tiger in Ek Tha Tiger, the Hindi espionage picture acquired a template that proved astonishingly durable: a near-immortal agent, an international canvas, a love interest who could match the hero blow for blow, and a plot that treated the intelligence agency as a kind of secular temple. Pathaan, War, and the Tiger sequels are variations on that template. They all assume the agent is exceptional, the nation is righteous, and the pleasure lies in watching an unbeatable man prove it again.

Dhurandhar shares the surface furniture of this world. Its protagonist is an Indian agent operating on hostile ground. Its plot turns on a long-term penetration of an enemy network. It features the institutional apparatus of intelligence, the handler relationship, the constant dread of exposure. It is shot on a scale that matches anything Yash Raj Films has mounted, with action that, when it arrives, can stand beside the best the genre has produced. Anyone who tracks how these productions perform commercially can compare Dhurandhar’s run against other Indian blockbusters and see that it competed in exactly the same marketplace, courting the same ticket buyer who made Pathaan a phenomenon.

So the surface parallel is real. These movies sell themselves to the same audience, occupy the same multiplex screens, and trade in the same iconography of guns, gadgets, and grim resolve. That shared bloodline is precisely what makes the divergence meaningful. When two films draw from the same source and arrive at opposite conclusions about what their genre is for, the gap between them is not an accident of execution. It is a statement of intent. Aditya Dhar knew exactly what the Bollywood spy thriller had become, and he built a franchise to argue against it. The fairest way to honor that argument is to take the comparison seriously rather than dismiss the blockbuster thrillers as lesser objects. They are not lesser. They are doing something different, and doing it deliberately. The complete analysis of Dhurandhar Part 1 lays out how thoroughly Dhar planned this departure from the first frame.

How Each Film Defines Its Hero

The fastest way to understand the chasm between Dhurandhar and the blockbuster espionage thriller is to ask a single question of each: what makes the protagonist heroic? The answers could not be more different, and everything else follows from them.

In Pathaan, the title character is heroic because he is exceptional and the movie never lets you forget it. Shah Rukh Khan’s agent is introduced as a legend whose name is spoken in hushed tones before he appears, a man presumed dead who returns with longer hair and harder muscles. His heroism is a matter of capacity. He can do what ordinary men cannot. He survives a fall that should kill him, fights through wounds that should incapacitate him, and bends physics around his will during a sequence on a frozen lake. The viewer is asked to admire him the way one admires a force of nature. War operates on identical logic, except it doubles the wattage by pitting Hrithik Roshan’s mentor against Tiger Shroff’s protege, two superhuman bodies in competition to out-spectacle each other. Tiger, across his trilogy, is heroic because he is unkillable and unwavering, a patriot whose loyalty is never genuinely in doubt and whose competence is never genuinely tested at the level of the soul. In all of these, heroism is a property the character possesses from the first frame. The movie does not build it. It reveals it.

Dhurandhar refuses this entirely. Its protagonist begins not as a legend but as a broken young man, Jaskirat Singh Rangi, hollowed out by a private catastrophe and recruited precisely because his grief makes him useful. He is not exceptional when we first meet him. He is damaged. What the movie calls heroism is not a capacity he was born with but a transformation he is put through, and the transformation is closer to a wound than a gift. To become Hamza Ali Mazari, the man the Karachi underworld will accept as one of its own, Jaskirat must surrender the parts of himself that made him human. His heroism, if the word even applies, lies in his willingness to disappear. He does not defeat the enemy by being better than them. He defeats them by becoming indistinguishable from them, and the movie’s central anxiety is whether anything of the original man survives the disguise. The Ranveer Singh career-best performance in Dhurandhar rests entirely on this refusal of the legend template; Singh plays a man being erased, not a man being celebrated.

Watch how each franchise stages the moment its hero is established, and the difference becomes physical. The blockbuster thrillers give their protagonist an entrance. A door opens, music swells, and the star walks into frame in slow motion while the camera worships him from below. The low angle is not incidental. It tells the viewer how to feel: this man is above you, larger than life, and you are here to look up at him. Dhurandhar gives its protagonist no such entrance. We meet Jaskirat at eye level, often from behind, frequently in shadow. When the camera finally lets us see his face clearly, what registers is not power but exhaustion. Dhar shoots his lead the way a documentarian shoots a subject under surveillance, not the way a worshipper shoots an idol. That choice of camera position is a thesis statement about heroism delivered without a word of dialogue.

The consequence of this divergence runs all the way to the ending of each movie. The spectacle spy thriller ends with vindication. The hero wins, the nation is safe, the agent rides into the sequel undimmed. Heroism in this model is sustainable; you can do it forever, film after film, and emerge each time intact and ready for more. Dhurandhar treats heroism as something that consumes the person who attempts it. There is no version of its protagonist that walks away whole, because the entire franchise is built on the premise that the work itself is the damage. A hero in Pathaan pays nothing he cannot recover. A hero in Dhurandhar pays with the only thing that cannot be replaced, which is the self. This is the first and deepest fracture between the two visions, and it is worth tracing through the other dimensions, because each one reproduces this same essential disagreement about what a person is for.

The Body as Weapon Versus the Body as Disguise

If heroism is the first dividing line, the human body is the second, and here the contrast becomes almost embarrassing in its clarity. The Bollywood spectacle thriller is, among other things, a showcase for the actor’s physique. Dhurandhar treats the body as a problem to be hidden rather than a product to be sold.

Consider how the YRF films photograph their leads. There is a near-mandatory sequence in each where the hero removes his shirt, and the camera lingers on a torso that has been sculpted through months of training and is lit to look like marble. This is not a criticism so much as an observation about purpose. In Pathaan and War, the body is the spectacle. The fight choreography is designed to display physical perfection in motion, every punch landing with a sound mix that turns flesh into a percussion instrument. The agent’s body is a weapon in the most literal sense, an instrument of force that wins by being stronger, faster, and more durable than anything it faces. Tiger Shroff’s entire screen identity is built on this: the body as the message, athleticism as character. When these movies want the viewer to understand that the hero is dangerous, they show him doing something physically impossible, and the impossibility is the thrill.

Dhurandhar uses the body for the opposite end. Hamza’s physique is not a weapon to be admired but a costume to be worn convincingly. The undercover agent’s body has to read as a Lyari local, a man shaped by the streets of a Karachi neighborhood, not as a gym-built Mumbai star. Ranveer Singh’s physical work in the role is therefore the inverse of the spectacle actor’s. Where the YRF lead bulks up to be looked at, Singh disappears into a body that has to pass unnoticed. The way he carries his shoulders, the slackness in his posture when he is among the men he is deceiving, the deliberate ordinariness of his frame, all of it is calibrated to make him invisible rather than impressive. There is a moment, examined more fully in the analysis of Dhurandhar’s action sequences, where Hamza takes a beating and does not fight back, absorbing the blows because fighting back would blow his cover. No blockbuster hero would ever do this. The whole point of the spectacle body is that it cannot be made to suffer without retaliating. Hamza’s body suffers and stays still, and the stillness is the performance.

This difference reshapes the action itself. In the YRF universe, combat is a dance of competence, two skilled bodies trading blows in a choreographed display that the viewer is meant to find beautiful. Violence is aestheticized into ballet. Dhurandhar’s combat is ugly by design. When Hamza fights, the framing is tight and disorienting, the blows land with a weight that reads as painful rather than impressive, and the choreography prioritizes survival over style. There is no slow motion to let the viewer savor a kill. There is no clean victory pose at the end of a brawl. The bodies that fight in Dhurandhar are vulnerable, and the movie insists on their vulnerability because vulnerability is the truth of the work it is depicting. A real deep-cover agent is not a superman. He is a frightened man trying not to die in a room full of people who would kill him if they knew his name.

The clearest illustration of this divergence is what each franchise does with injury. In the blockbuster thrillers, wounds are cosmetic. A hero might bleed dramatically from the lip to signal that the fight was hard, but the injury never genuinely impairs him, and by the next scene it has effectively vanished. The body is functionally indestructible. Dhurandhar tracks damage with a different kind of honesty. Pain accumulates. A wound taken early in an operation still hampers Hamza later. The body keeps a ledger, and the movie makes the viewer feel the cost of every blow because the cost is the subject. This is the same philosophical disagreement as before, expressed through flesh: the blockbuster says the body can give endlessly and recover, while Dhurandhar says the body is finite and every demand made on it leaves a mark. For a fuller picture of how this physical realism connects to Dhar’s wider method, the Aditya Dhar filmmaking style analysis traces the director’s commitment to consequence across his career.

What the Audience Is Asked to Feel About Violence

The third dimension is the most morally revealing, because it concerns not what the movies show but what they want the viewer to feel while watching it. Violence is the common currency of the genre. What separates Dhurandhar from its peers is the emotional response each movie engineers around the act of killing.

The blockbuster espionage thriller wants violence to feel good. This is not a cynical claim; it is a description of craft. When Pathaan dispatches a roomful of enemies, the editing rhythm, the musical sting, and the framing all conspire to produce a sensation of triumph in the viewer. The viewer is meant to cheer. Each kill is a small victory, a beat of satisfaction in a larger arc of vindication. The enemies are rendered faceless and interchangeable precisely so that their deaths carry no moral weight, freeing the viewer to enjoy the spectacle without the burden of conscience. War turns this into pure kinetic pleasure, two heroes competing to deliver the most stylish takedown, the deaths almost incidental to the choreographic display. The genre has perfected the art of making lethal force feel like a sport, and the viewer leaves the theater exhilarated rather than disturbed.

Dhurandhar wants violence to feel like a wound, including the violence its protagonist inflicts. When Hamza kills, the movie does not give the viewer permission to cheer. The framing holds on the act longer than comfort allows. The men he kills are not faceless; the story takes pains to make some of them human, to let the viewer understand that the people Hamza destroys had lives, loyalties, and families. There is a sequence in which Hamza must betray someone who has come to trust him, and the camera refuses to look away from what the betrayal costs both men. The viewer is not exhilarated. The viewer is implicated. Dhar’s argument is that violence in the real world of intelligence is not a sport but a moral catastrophe, and a movie that depicts it honestly should leave its viewer feeling some version of what the agent feels, which is sick.

This is where the le Carre comparison earns its place. The British novelist built his career on the conviction that the spy story had a moral obligation the thriller had abandoned: to show that the people we send into the dark do not come back clean, and that the enemies they destroy are often as human as they are. Dhurandhar inherits this conviction wholesale. Its violence is not cathartic. It is corrosive. Every act of force the protagonist commits is presented as a withdrawal from a moral account that can never be replenished, and by the duology’s end the viewer understands that the body count is also a soul count. The blockbuster thrillers keep no such ledger. Their violence is weightless because their universe is weightless, a place where heroes kill freely and sleep soundly. Dhurandhar’s violence has weight because its universe has gravity, and that gravity is the single most important thing separating it from the films it is shelved beside.

It is worth being precise about what this does and does not mean. Dhurandhar is not a pacifist film, and it does not condemn its protagonist for the violence he commits. The series understands that the work sometimes requires lethal force and does not pretend otherwise. What it refuses is the fantasy that such force is free. The blockbuster offers violence as pleasure with no hangover. Dhurandhar offers violence as necessity with a permanent hangover. Both are coherent artistic choices, but they produce fundamentally different experiences, and a viewer who walks into Dhurandhar expecting the clean exhilaration of Pathaan will walk out unsettled, because the movie has quietly refused to let them enjoy the thing they came to enjoy. That refusal is not a failure of the movie. It is the picture’s entire purpose.

The Architecture of Time and the Lesson of Baby

The fourth dimension is time, and it is the one that pulls a quieter film into the conversation. Neeraj Pandey’s Baby, released a decade before Dhurandhar, is the Hindi espionage thriller that took the work seriously before it was fashionable to do so, and setting it beside Dhar’s franchise reveals how much the handling of time governs everything else.

Baby is a procedural. Akshay Kumar’s covert operative moves through a compressed timeline, a ticking-clock structure in which the mission unfolds over days and the tension comes from the race against a deadline. Pandey was interested in competence and process, in the unglamorous mechanics of how a counterterrorism unit actually functions. There is real seriousness in Baby, a refusal of the superhero register that marks it as a precursor to Dhurandhar rather than a member of the spectacle club. But its emotional register is constrained by its timescale. Because the events occur over a short span, the picture can dramatize the danger of the work without fully dramatizing its corrosion. A man can hold himself together for a week-long operation. The question of what a decade of deception does to a human personality simply does not arise, because the clock never runs that long.

Dhurandhar operates across years, and the extended timescale is not a detail of plot but the foundation of its psychology. When a man lives a false identity for ten years, the falseness stops being a costume and starts becoming a second skin. The franchise’s deepest insight is that you cannot pretend to be someone for a decade without partly becoming them. Hamza is not Jaskirat wearing a mask for an afternoon. He is a man who has spent more of his adult life as Hamza than as himself, and the terrifying question the franchise poses is whether the mask has become the face. Baby could not ask this question because Baby’s clock was too short. Dhurandhar can ask it because its clock runs across a decade, and the answer it arrives at is genuinely disturbing: at some point the cover identity accumulates more lived experience, more real relationships, more genuine memory than the original, and the agent can no longer be certain which self is the performance.

This is why the comparison with Baby is so instructive rather than merely flattering to Dhurandhar. Baby proves that Hindi cinema could take espionage seriously without going to Dhar’s extreme. The two films share a refusal of the spectacle register and a respect for the intelligence of the audience. What separates them is ambition of scope. Pandey wanted to show that the work is dangerous and difficult. Dhar wanted to show that the work is identity-destroying, and that argument required a timescale Baby never attempted. The longer clock is not just more story. It is a different thesis about what espionage does to the human soul, and it could only be reached by letting the years pile up until the protagonist’s original self is buried under the weight of his cover.

The crowd-pleasers, by contrast, exist outside time almost entirely. Tiger ages across his trilogy only in the sense that the actor ages; the character is essentially static, the same man in each installment, untouched by the accumulated weight of what he has done. Pathaan’s timeline is elastic and ultimately irrelevant, a backdrop for set pieces rather than a force acting on the character. The blockbuster hero is immune to time the way he is immune to injury, because both immunities serve the same fantasy of a self that cannot be eroded. Dhurandhar makes time the primary antagonist. The enemy network is dangerous, but the real threat to Hamza is the slow accumulation of years in which his Indian self fades and his Pakistani cover grows more real. Time is what the franchise is actually about, and that is why no film built on a short clock, however serious, can reach the place Dhurandhar reaches. The complete analysis of Dhurandhar The Revenge shows how the second installment pays off this long arc, letting the years collected in Part 1 detonate in Part 2.

Raazi and the Gendered Spy: The Comparison That Cuts Deepest

Of all the films Dhurandhar can be measured against, Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi is the one that matters most, because it is the only Hindi espionage picture that shares Dhurandhar’s true subject: the moral horror of betraying people you have come to love. Where the crowd-pleasers offer a contrast of philosophies, Raazi offers something closer to a sibling, and the differences between siblings are always the most revealing.

The parallels are striking. Both films center on an Indian agent who goes undercover inside Pakistan. Both protagonists build genuine relationships within the family or network they have infiltrated. Both discover that the most painful part of the work is not the danger of exposure but the cruelty of deceiving people who have shown them real kindness. Alia Bhatt’s Sehmat in Raazi marries into a Pakistani military family and comes to feel actual affection for the people she is spying on, and the picture’s central agony is that she must weaponize that affection against them. Hamza in Dhurandhar undergoes the same essential ordeal across the Karachi underworld, forming bonds he will eventually have to sever with violence. Both films understand that the spy’s deepest wound is self-inflicted: the betrayal of trust freely given.

But two differences transform the comparison into an argument. The first is timescale, the same factor that distinguished Baby. Raazi operates over months. Sehmat’s marriage and the relationships she forms develop quickly, and her ordeal, while genuine, is bounded by a relatively short span before the operation reaches its crisis. Dhurandhar’s decade means Hamza’s bonds have years to deepen, which makes their eventual betrayal proportionally more devastating. Sehmat betrays people she has known for a season. Hamza betrays people he has known for a third of his life. The math of the heartbreak is different.

The second and more interesting difference is gender, and this is where the comparison becomes genuinely illuminating about the spy narrative as a form. Raazi places a woman at the center of the espionage story, and Gulzar uses that placement to interrogate how the nation uses women’s bodies and emotional labor as instruments of statecraft. Sehmat’s cover is marriage; her weapon is domestic intimacy; her vulnerability is bound up with the specific dangers a woman faces in a hostile household. The picture is, among other things, about how patriarchy and nationalism collaborate to make a woman’s affection into a tool. Dhurandhar, with a man at its center, tells a structurally similar story but in a completely different key. Hamza’s cover is criminal brotherhood rather than marriage; his weapon is loyalty and violence rather than domestic intimacy; his vulnerability is the constant threat of physical exposure in a world of armed men. The gendering changes the texture of the entire ordeal.

What is most worth noticing is that the male version is, in some ways, the easier story to tell, and Dhurandhar knows it. The culture has a ready-made template for the man who sacrifices himself in violent service to the nation; it is one of the oldest stories there is. Raazi had to do something harder, which was to make the audience reckon with a woman placed in the same machine, a placement that the culture finds more disturbing precisely because it has fewer comfortable scripts for it. Dhurandhar benefits from the familiarity of the male sacrifice narrative even as it complicates that narrative. It is telling a story the audience is primed to accept, and it uses that acceptance to smuggle in the same moral horror Raazi confronted head-on. Both films arrive at the conviction that undercover work is a betrayal of the heart as much as a service to the state. Raazi reached that conviction by making the audience uncomfortable about gender. Dhurandhar reaches it by extending the timescale until the male hero’s familiar sacrifice becomes something stranger and more corrosive than the template prepared anyone for. Read together, the two films map the full territory of the undercover-in-Pakistan story, one through the lens of a woman over months, the other through a man over years, and neither is complete without the other.

The Hollywood Mirror: Bourne, Smiley, and the Hunt for bin Laden

Indian spy cinema has spent two decades glancing across the ocean at Hollywood, and the comparison Dhurandhar invites is not with James Bond but with the films that grew up in Bond’s shadow and rejected him. Understanding which Western tradition Dhurandhar belongs to clarifies what it is doing in a way no domestic comparison fully can.

The Bond model, the suave agent with the gadgets and the quips and the bottomless competence, is the template the YRF universe localized for Indian audiences. Pathaan and his peers are essentially Bond reimagined with Hindi music and nationalist fervor, the invincible operative who treats espionage as a glamorous adventure. But Hollywood itself moved away from this model years ago. The Bourne films, beginning in the early 2000s, reinvented the screen operative as a hunted, fragmented man whose greatest enemy was his own agency and whose defining condition was the loss of identity. Jason Bourne does not know who he is; the state made him into a weapon and then tried to discard him. The handheld camera, the brutal practical fights, the paranoid texture, all of it was a deliberate rebuke to the Bond fantasy. Dhurandhar belongs unmistakably to the Bourne lineage rather than the Bond one. Its protagonist, too, is a man whose identity has been engineered and is now in danger of dissolving, and its action shares the Bourne films’ commitment to weight and consequence over elegance.

But the deeper kinship is with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the adaptation of le Carre’s novel, and with Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s procedural about the hunt for bin Laden. Tinker Tailor is a movie almost without action, built entirely on the slow moral attrition of intelligence work, the way it hollows out the people who practice it until they can no longer feel the difference between loyalty and betrayal. George Smiley is the anti-Bond, an aging, unglamorous man whose victories taste of ash. Dhurandhar shares this conviction that the real drama of espionage is internal and moral, not external and kinetic. And Zero Dark Thirty matters because of how it handles the relationship between a long obsessive operation and the person consumed by it; Maya, its protagonist, gives years of her life to a single hunt and emerges with nothing but the hollow victory and the unanswered question of what it was all for. The final shot of that film, a face emptied by the cost of the work, could serve as a thesis image for Dhurandhar as well.

What is striking is that Dhurandhar reaches for the Western tradition Hollywood arrived at after it grew tired of Bond, while the YRF films are still localizing the Bond model Hollywood abandoned. This is not a knock on the crowd-pleasers, which are doing exactly what their audience wants with great skill. But it positions Dhurandhar as the more globally current of the two visions, the one in conversation with where serious spy cinema actually is rather than where it was in the 1960s. Indian cinema gains something specific by rejecting the Bond model: it gains access to the moral seriousness that the form is capable of, the recognition that a spy story can be a tragedy rather than an adventure. Dhurandhar is the first major Hindi espionage thriller to fully claim that inheritance, and it does so without abandoning the scale and craft that the Indian public expects. That balance, the moral weight of le Carre married to the production ambition of a Hindi tentpole, is its real innovation.

It would be a mistake, though, to treat Dhurandhar as merely an Indian copy of these Western models. It localizes the tragic spy tradition in ways that are specific to the subcontinent. The wound that makes Jaskirat into Hamza is rooted in the particular history of cross-border terrorism that India has lived through, a history examined in detail in the analysis of the real events that inspired the franchise. The moral horror of his work is inseparable from the specific religious and national identity he must assume, a Sikh Indian man becoming a Muslim Pakistani, a transformation loaded with meaning that no Western espionage thriller could carry. The tragic spy tradition gave Dhar a register. The subcontinent’s history gave him a subject. The marriage of the two is what makes Dhurandhar feel both globally literate and unmistakably Indian, and it is why the Hollywood comparison illuminates without diminishing.

The Institution: Temple Versus Predator

There is a fifth dimension worth examining, because it concerns how each movie imagines the intelligence agency itself, and the difference reveals a political fault line running beneath the genre. The blockbuster treats the agency as a temple. Dhurandhar treats it as something closer to a predator.

In the YRF universe, the intelligence apparatus is fundamentally benevolent. There may be a rogue agent or a corrupt official as a plot device, but the institution itself is sound, a guardian of the nation staffed by patriots who occasionally need to be defended from a bad apple. The agency commands the hero’s loyalty and deserves it. When Tiger or Pathaan serves the state, the state is worthy of the service, and the picture never seriously questions whether the institution might use its people in ways that are themselves a kind of violence. This is the temple model: the agency as a sacred space, the agent as a devotee, the mission as an act of faith. It is emotionally satisfying and politically reassuring, and it is one of the reasons these movies succeed with a mass public that wants to believe the nation’s protectors are pure.

Dhurandhar will not offer this comfort. Its intelligence apparatus, embodied in the handler who recruits and runs Jaskirat, is presented with deep ambivalence. The recruitment itself is shown as a kind of exploitation: the agency identifies a broken young man, recognizes that his grief makes him pliable, and offers him a purpose that is really a sentence. Is this heroic mentorship or institutional predation? The franchise refuses to resolve the question, and that refusal is the point. The state in Dhurandhar gets its work done, but it does so by consuming a human being, by taking a man at his most vulnerable and converting his pain into a tool. The agency is effective, but its effectiveness is built on a foundation of human sacrifice that the picture insists the audience see clearly. This is the predator model: the institution as something that feeds on the people it deploys, however necessary its goals.

This divergence is not merely thematic; it is structural to how each movie generates meaning. The blockbuster can keep its violence weightless partly because its institution is righteous; if the agency is a temple, then serving it cleanses rather than corrupts, and the hero can kill without moral residue because he kills in a sacred cause. Dhurandhar’s violence has weight partly because its institution is compromised; if the agency is a predator that has consumed its own agent, then the violence that agent commits cannot be cleansing, because the whole enterprise is morally tangled from the start. The political stakes of this are considerable. The temple model affirms the audience’s faith in the nation’s protectors. The predator model asks the audience to hold that faith and a profound discomfort at the same time, to support the work while recognizing its human cost. That Dhurandhar managed to do this within a mass-market blockbuster, to question the institution without condemning the nation, is part of why it landed as more than entertainment. The fuller account of how it pulled off this balancing act, and the controversy it generated in doing so, is traced in the examination of why Dhurandhar changed Bollywood forever.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

A comparison that only flatters its preferred subject is not criticism; it is advocacy. So it is necessary to be honest about where the contrast between Dhurandhar and the spectacle spy thriller stops being fair, and where Dhurandhar itself falls short of the standard it implicitly sets.

The first place the comparison breaks down is in the matter of audience contract. The YRF espionage thrillers are not failing to do what Dhurandhar does; they are succeeding at something else entirely, and judging them by Dhurandhar’s standard is a category error. Pathaan promises spectacle and delivers it with enormous skill. Its viewers do not want a meditation on the corrosion of identity; they want two hours of triumphant escapism, and the picture provides exactly that. To call it shallow for not being Dhurandhar is like calling a symphony shallow for not being a novel. The blockbuster is a legitimate form with its own discipline, and its weightlessness is a feature its viewers pay for, not a flaw it failed to correct. Dhurandhar is doing something more serious, but seriousness is not the only measure of cinematic value, and a piece that pretends otherwise is being dishonest about the pleasures the genre exists to provide.

The second place the comparison breaks down is in Dhurandhar’s own consistency. The franchise is not the seamless tragedy its admirers sometimes claim. It is a mass-market production with commercial obligations, and those obligations occasionally pull it toward the very spectacle register it is supposedly rejecting. There are sequences, particularly in the back half of the second installment, where the production reaches for the crowd-pleasing beat, the heroic flourish, the moment designed to make an audience cheer rather than wince. In those moments Dhurandhar is closer to Pathaan than its thesis would admit. The franchise wants to have it both ways, to be the serious tragedy of espionage and also the blockbuster that sells tickets to people who came for the action, and the seam between those ambitions sometimes shows. A purist would argue that the cheering moments betray the moral architecture the rest of the production builds so carefully, and the purist would have a point.

The third weakness is more specific and worth naming. For all its psychological ambition, Dhurandhar occasionally tells rather than shows the cost it is so concerned with. The franchise is at its best when it lets the corrosion register through performance and image, through the exhaustion in a face or the stillness of a body absorbing a blow. It is at its weakest when it underlines the theme through dialogue, when a character articulates the cost of the work in words rather than trusting the audience to feel it. The glamour thrillers, for all their lack of depth, rarely make this mistake, because they are not trying to communicate anything that requires subtlety. Dhurandhar’s reach sometimes exceeds its grasp precisely because it is reaching for something hard, and the films it is compared against avoid the failure only by never attempting the thing in the first place.

Finally, the le Carre comparison, useful as it is, can be pushed too far. Le Carre’s universe is one of almost total moral exhaustion, where no cause is clean and no victory is real. Dhurandhar does not go that far, and arguably cannot, given the patriotic frame within which a mainstream Hindi film must operate. Its agency is a predator, but the nation it serves is never genuinely questioned; the wound is institutional, not national. Le Carre would have turned the same skepticism on the cause itself, asked whether the whole enterprise of statecraft was worth the human cost. Dhurandhar stops short of that final move, keeping its critique within bounds that a mass Indian public could accept. This is not necessarily a flaw, but it is a limit, and it means the le Carre comparison illuminates Dhurandhar’s ambition while also marking the boundary that ambition does not cross. The franchise is the most morally serious Hindi espionage thriller yet made, and it is still less morally radical than the tradition it draws from. Both things are true, and an honest comparison has to hold them together.

What the Comparison Reveals

Step back from the individual dimensions and a larger picture comes into view, one that explains why this comparison matters beyond the question of which film is better. Putting Dhurandhar beside its peers reveals something about the Hindi film industry at a particular moment, about its audience, and about the genre’s future.

The first revelation is that the Indian audience has grown more capacious than the escapist model assumed. For years the conventional wisdom held that the mass Hindi public wanted only escapism, that an espionage thriller had to be a triumphant fantasy to succeed at scale. Dhurandhar’s reception disproves this. A picture that refuses easy pleasure, that asks its audience to sit with discomfort and to feel the cost of the violence it depicts, succeeded commercially at a level that puts it in conversation with the biggest glamour thrillers. This suggests that a significant portion of the audience was hungry for exactly the seriousness the genre had been withholding, and that the perceived ceiling on what mass audiences would accept was lower than the reality. The numbers tell this story plainly, and anyone who wants to see how a difficult film found a mass public can track day-wise collection trends for both installments and watch the word of mouth build for a picture that gave its viewers no easy comfort.

The second revelation concerns the filmmaker. Aditya Dhar’s career, from his debut through Dhurandhar, traces an argument about what Indian action cinema can be, and the comparison with the escapist thrillers clarifies the stakes of that argument. Dhar is betting that scale and seriousness are not opposites, that you can mount a blockbuster on the scale of a YRF tentpole and use it to tell a story of genuine moral weight. This bet runs against the industry’s instincts, which have long treated big budgets as a reason to play safe. The detailed account of this gamble appears in the comparison of Dhurandhar with Uri, which shows how Dhar’s ambition grew between his films. What the comparison with the spectacle thrillers reveals is that Dhar is not trying to make a better Pathaan. He is trying to prove that the Pathaan model is not the only way to make money at this scale, and that the moral seriousness of world cinema can be funded by the commercial appetites of the Indian mass market. If he is right, the consequences for the industry are significant.

The third and final revelation is about the genre itself, and it is the largest. The genre, in every cinema that has taken it up, eventually faces a choice between two visions of what the spy story is for. One vision treats espionage as adventure, a stage for heroism and spectacle, a fantasy of competence and control. The other treats espionage as tragedy, a study of what the work does to the people who do it, a recognition that the men and women we send into the dark pay a price that does not show up in any budget. Hollywood faced this choice and, at its most ambitious, chose tragedy, producing the Bourne films and Tinker Tailor and Zero Dark Thirty. Hindi cinema, until recently, chose adventure almost exclusively, localizing the Bond fantasy for an audience that wanted heroes who could not be hurt. Dhurandhar is the production that puts the other choice on the table for Indian cinema at full scale. It argues that the Hindi espionage thriller can be a tragedy without ceasing to be a blockbuster, that the audience can handle the weight, and that the genre’s future lies not in bigger stunts but in deeper wounds. Whether the industry follows where Dhurandhar leads is the open question. But the comparison makes one thing certain: after Dhurandhar, no one can claim that the Hindi espionage thriller had to be weightless. It was a choice, and Dhar proved another choice was possible.

That is what the comparison finally reveals. The distance between Dhurandhar and Pathaan is not a distance of quality but of philosophy, two coherent and opposed answers to the question of what a spy story should make an audience feel. The blockbuster wants you to leave the theater exhilarated, certain of the nation’s strength and the hero’s invincibility. Dhurandhar wants you to leave unsettled, aware of what was paid and by whom, carrying the weight the agent carries. Both are legitimate. But only one of them treats the spy as a human being rather than a fantasy, and that is the difference that makes Dhurandhar matter. It refused the genre’s founding bargain, and in refusing it, it showed the genre what else it could be.

The Love Interest and the Problem of Intimacy

A dimension that rarely gets analytical attention, but should, is how each film handles romance, because the love interest in an espionage thriller is never just a love interest. She is a test of what the production believes about the agent’s capacity for connection, and the two visions diverge here as sharply as anywhere.

The escapist thriller gives its hero a partner who is his equal, and the relationship is essentially frictionless at the level of the soul. The Pathaan model pairs the male agent with a woman who can fight beside him, match his banter, and occasionally betray him in a plot twist that is always resolved without lasting damage. The romance is glamorous, athletic, and ultimately weightless, like everything else in the shared universe. The lovers are two invincible people enjoying each other; the relationship costs neither of them anything they cannot recover. Even when the woman is revealed as an enemy agent, the production treats the betrayal as a plot mechanism rather than a wound, and the couple typically reconciles by the climax. Intimacy in these films is a pleasure, not a danger, because nothing in the shared universe is allowed to genuinely hurt.

Dhurandhar makes intimacy a catastrophe. For a deep-cover agent, any genuine connection is a liability, a thread that can be pulled to unravel the entire operation, and the franchise understands this with painful clarity. Hamza cannot afford to love because love is a vulnerability his enemies can exploit and because every relationship he forms is built on a lie he will eventually have to detonate. The franchise’s treatment of intimacy is therefore tragic rather than romantic. When Hamza forms a bond, the audience does not feel the warmth of new love; it feels dread, because it knows what the bond will cost when the cover ends. The deepest cruelty of the work is that the agent must use affection as a tool, must let people care for him precisely so he can betray them, and Dhurandhar refuses to soften this. There is no frictionless romance here, no equal partner enjoying the adventure. There is only the impossibility of honest connection for a man whose entire existence is a performance.

This connects directly to the question of identity that runs beneath the whole franchise. The blockbuster hero can love because he knows who he is; his identity is stable, so his relationships are stable. Hamza cannot love honestly because he no longer knows which self would be doing the loving. Is the affection Jaskirat’s or Hamza’s? Is it real or part of the cover? The franchise leaves these questions deliberately unresolved, and the unresolvability is the tragedy. A man who has lived a lie for a decade cannot be sure his own feelings are authentic, and that uncertainty poisons every intimate moment. The escapist thriller’s frictionless romance and Dhurandhar’s poisoned intimacy are two answers to the same question about whether a spy can remain a full human being, and they reach opposite conclusions for the same reason they differ on everything else: one believes the self survives the work, and the other believes the work consumes the self.

The Villain as Mirror

Spy thrillers are defined as much by their antagonists as their heroes, and the way each film constructs its enemy reveals its deepest assumptions. The escapist thriller and Dhurandhar build villains on opposite principles, and the contrast is illuminating.

The YRF universe favors the larger-than-life antagonist, the charismatic megalomaniac whose schemes are grand and whose menace is theatrical. These villains are spectacular by design, matching the heroes in scale and flamboyance, because the crowd-pleaser needs an enemy worthy of its superhuman protagonist. The antagonist’s evil is rarely complicated; he is bad in a way the audience can comfortably hate, his motivations broad enough to justify any amount of heroic violence against him. This is not a failure of the form but a requirement of it. A spectacle thriller needs a villain the audience can enjoy seeing destroyed, and complexity would interfere with that enjoyment. The faceless henchmen exist to be mowed down, and the grand villain exists to be defeated in a climactic confrontation that vindicates the hero’s superiority.

Dhurandhar builds its enemies as mirrors rather than monsters, and this is one of its most quietly radical choices. The figures Hamza must navigate in the Karachi underworld are not cartoon villains but men with their own logic, loyalties, and grievances, men whose world makes sense from the inside. The franchise takes the time to make some of them sympathetic, to let the audience understand why a man might end up where these men have ended up. This is precisely the le Carre move: the recognition that the enemy is not a different species but a version of yourself shaped by different circumstances. When Hamza destroys these men, the feature does not offer the clean satisfaction of watching evil defeated. It offers the queasier recognition that the people he destroys are human, that the line between Hamza and the men he hunts is thinner than comfort allows, and that in becoming Hamza he has become genuinely close to them. The villain as mirror forces the audience to confront the moral cost of the hero’s victory in a way the villain as monster never could.

The richest illustration of this is the relationship between Hamza and the underworld figures who come to trust him. Because the franchise has made these men human, their eventual betrayal lands as tragedy rather than triumph. The audience has been allowed to see them as people, which means it feels the betrayal as a loss rather than a win. This is the structural payoff of building villains as mirrors: it converts the climax from a vindication into a wound. A more detailed treatment of how this underworld functions as a living world appears in the broader franchise analysis, but the essential point for this comparison is clear. The crowd-pleaser needs monsters so its violence can be celebrated. Dhurandhar needs mirrors so its violence can be mourned. The choice of antagonist is not a detail; it is the difference between a picture that wants you to cheer and a film that wants you to grieve.

Why the Shared-Universe Logic Cannot Contain Dhurandhar

There is one more structural difference worth examining, because it concerns the very architecture of how these films are built to exist in the world. The YRF universe is, as its name announces, a connected franchise, with characters crossing between films and a continuity designed to sustain endless installments. Dhurandhar is a duology with a finite, completed arc, and this difference is not incidental to its meaning.

The shared-universe model is built on the assumption that the story never ends. Tiger appears in Pathaan; Pathaan will presumably appear elsewhere; the universe expands indefinitely because the characters are durable enough to be redeployed forever. This durability is the same immunity to consequence discussed earlier, now operating at the level of franchise architecture. The blockbuster hero cannot be permanently damaged because a damaged hero cannot anchor the next installment. The shared universe requires its protagonists to survive intact, mission after mission, so that they remain available for future stories. The structure itself enforces weightlessness; a character who could be genuinely destroyed would be useless to a franchise that needs him back next year.

Dhurandhar’s finite structure is the formal expression of its thematic seriousness. Because the franchise believes the work consumes the agent, it cannot pretend the agent is endlessly redeployable. The arc has an end, and the end is the point. The duology structure allows Dhurandhar to do what the open-ended franchise cannot: to follow the cost of the work all the way to its conclusion, to show what a decade of deception finally does to a man, and to let that conclusion be permanent. There is no third installment waiting to undo the damage, no reset that returns the protagonist to fighting shape for the next adventure. The finitude is what gives the story its weight, because consequences only matter if they are allowed to stick. The shared universe, by design, never lets consequences stick, which is why it can never tell the story Dhurandhar tells.

This is perhaps the deepest structural reason the two visions cannot be reconciled. The crowd-pleaser’s open-ended architecture and Dhurandhar’s closed arc are not just different business models; they encode different beliefs about whether a human being can be used up. The franchise that runs forever believes its hero is inexhaustible. The duology that ends believes its hero is finite, that the work has a cost that eventually comes due, and that the only honest way to tell that story is to let it end. Dhurandhar could not have been a shared universe without betraying its own argument, and the escapist thrillers could not adopt its finitude without abandoning the perpetual motion that sustains them. The structure is the philosophy, and the two philosophies are incompatible all the way down to the architecture of how the stories are allowed to exist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Dhurandhar better than Pathaan?

This is the wrong question, even though it is the one most people ask. The two pictures are pursuing different goals, so ranking them is like asking whether a tragedy is better than a comedy. Pathaan sets out to deliver triumphant escapism on a massive scale and succeeds at that with real craft; its action, its star power, and its sense of fun are all calibrated for an audience that wants to leave the theater exhilarated. Dhurandhar sets out to deliver a morally serious study of what undercover work does to a human being, and it succeeds at that. If you value emotional depth, psychological realism, and moral weight, Dhurandhar will land harder. If you value spectacle, momentum, and uncomplicated heroism, Pathaan will satisfy more. The honest answer is that Dhurandhar is more ambitious and Pathaan is more purely entertaining, and which one is better depends entirely on what you want an espionage thriller to do. What can be said without hedging is that Dhurandhar attempts something harder and reaches a place that the escapist model is structurally incapable of reaching.

Q: Why do people compare Dhurandhar to John le Carre?

Because the comparison is accurate at the level of philosophy. John le Carre was a British novelist, himself a former intelligence officer, who spent his career arguing that espionage is a morally corrosive business that damages the people who practice it, and that the enemy is rarely a monster but usually a human being shaped by different loyalties. His most famous works, including the George Smiley novels, reject the glamorous James Bond fantasy in favor of moral exhaustion, betrayal, and the slow erosion of the self. Dhurandhar shares all of this. Its protagonist is hollowed out by the work, its enemies are rendered human, and its central conviction is that deception extracts a permanent cost. Most Hindi espionage thrillers descend from the Bond tradition of the invincible glamorous agent. Dhurandhar descends instead from the le Carre tradition of the spy as a tragic figure, which is why critics reach for the comparison. It is the closest available shorthand for what Dhar is doing that the spectacle thrillers are not.

Q: How is Dhurandhar different from the YRF Spy Universe?

The differences run deeper than budget or casting. The YRF universe, which includes Pathaan, the War films, and the Tiger trilogy, is built on the premise that the agent is exceptional and essentially indestructible, that espionage is a stage for heroic spectacle, and that the violence the hero commits is a source of pleasure for the audience. The agency is righteous, the nation is pure, and the hero survives every film intact and ready for the next installment. Dhurandhar inverts all of this. Its protagonist begins as a broken man rather than a legend, its action emphasizes vulnerability and cost rather than invincibility, its violence is presented as a moral wound rather than a thrill, and its agency is shown as something that consumes the people it deploys. Most fundamentally, the YRF films are an open-ended franchise built to run forever, while Dhurandhar is a finite duology with a completed arc that lets its consequences become permanent. The two are not better and worse versions of the same thing; they are opposed visions of what a spy story is for.

Q: Is Dhurandhar based on a true story?

Dhurandhar is a work of fiction, but it is woven from real events and inspired by real figures, in the way that serious historical fiction often is. The franchise draws on the actual history of cross-border terrorism and intelligence operations on the subcontinent, and several of its characters are inspired by real people who lived and in some cases died in that world. The feature does not dramatize a single documented operation; rather, it reorganizes real events and figures into an original espionage narrative. This approach places it closer to a film like Zero Dark Thirty, which built a fictionalized account around real events, than to a pure invention. The blend of fact and fiction is part of what gives the franchise its weight, because the moral questions it raises are not hypothetical; they echo dilemmas that real intelligence work actually produces. For readers interested in the specific real events and figures behind the story, the franchise’s relationship to history rewards close study.

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Raazi?

Raazi, directed by Meghna Gulzar and led by Alia Bhatt, is the Hindi intelligence thriller closest to Dhurandhar in its true concerns, which makes the comparison especially rich. Both films center on an Indian agent who goes undercover inside Pakistan, forms genuine relationships with the people being deceived, and confronts the moral horror of betraying that trust. The crucial differences are timescale and gender. Raazi unfolds over months, while Dhurandhar spans a decade, which makes Hamza’s eventual betrayals proportionally more devastating because the bonds have had years to deepen. And Raazi places a woman at the center, using that placement to examine how the state weaponizes women’s emotional and domestic labor, while Dhurandhar tells a structurally similar story through a man, whose cover is criminal brotherhood rather than marriage. Read together, the two films map the full territory of the undercover-in-Pakistan narrative from complementary angles. Raazi confronts the moral horror through the lens of gender over a short span; Dhurandhar reaches the same horror by extending the male sacrifice narrative across years until it becomes something stranger and more corrosive.

Q: Does Dhurandhar have as much action as Pathaan or War?

Dhurandhar has substantial action, but it is staged on completely different principles, so a viewer expecting the Pathaan experience may be surprised. Where the escapist thrillers choreograph combat as a beautiful display of superhuman competence, complete with slow motion and triumphant scoring, Dhurandhar shoots its action tight, ugly, and disorienting, emphasizing how dangerous and painful violence actually is. The fights in Dhurandhar are not designed to be savored; they are designed to be survived, and the framing keeps the audience anxious rather than exhilarated. There is also simply less wall-to-wall action, because Dhurandhar devotes much of its running time to the psychological texture of undercover life, the slow-burn tension of maintaining a cover rather than the kinetic release of a set piece. So the answer is that Dhurandhar has plenty of action by any normal standard, but it is action with a different purpose and a different feel, and anyone walking in expecting the clean spectacle of War will find something heavier and more unsettling.

Q: Why does Dhurandhar feel more like a Hollywood spy film than a Bollywood one?

Because it draws on the Western spy tradition that Hollywood arrived at after it grew tired of the James Bond fantasy, rather than the Bond model that the YRF films localized for Indian audiences. The Bourne films reinvented the screen operative as a hunted, fragmented man at war with his own agency; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy built an entire film on moral attrition rather than action; Zero Dark Thirty followed a single obsessive operation to a hollow conclusion. Dhurandhar belongs to this lineage of serious, morally weighted spy cinema. Its handheld intensity, its emphasis on consequence over elegance, and its conviction that the real drama of espionage is internal all echo these films. That said, it would be a mistake to call it merely an Indian copy of a Hollywood model. Dhurandhar localizes the tragic spy tradition in ways specific to the subcontinent, rooting its protagonist’s wound in the particular history of cross-border conflict and loading his transformation with religious and national meaning that no Western film could carry. It feels Hollywood-adjacent because it claims the moral seriousness that world cinema reached, but its subject is unmistakably Indian.

Q: What makes Ranveer Singh’s performance different from the typical spy hero role?

The spy hero role, as the spectacle films have defined it, calls for an actor to embody invincibility, charisma, and physical perfection, to be looked at and admired. Ranveer Singh’s work in Dhurandhar does the opposite. He plays a man whose entire job is to be unremarkable, to disappear into a body and an identity that will not draw attention, and the performance is therefore an exercise in subtraction rather than display. Singh, an actor previously known for flamboyance and outsized energy, strips all of that away. He plays exhaustion, suppression, the constant strain of holding a false self together, the small physical adjustments by which a man passes as someone he is not. The achievement is in the restraint, in the way he lets the original self bleed through the cover at precisely chosen moments, in the stillness with which he absorbs humiliation that a blockbuster hero would never tolerate. It is a performance about erasure rather than assertion, and it represents a significant departure from both the spy hero template and Singh’s own established screen identity, which is part of why it has been singled out as a career landmark.

Q: Is the Karachi underworld in Dhurandhar realistic?

The franchise puts enormous effort into making its Karachi feel authentic, and the result is one of its most praised achievements, even though the production faced obvious constraints in depicting a city it could not film in directly. The world of the feature is built with specific attention to the economy, the power hierarchies, and the daily texture of the neighborhood it depicts, creating an ecosystem that operates by its own internal logic rather than serving as mere backdrop. The underworld is not a generic den of villainy but a living social order with its own rules, loyalties, and rhythms, and the film’s commitment to this specificity is part of what separates it from the spectacle thrillers, which tend to treat their locations as interchangeable arenas for action. Whether every detail would satisfy someone with direct knowledge of the real place is a separate question, but as a piece of immersive world-building within a fiction film, the Karachi of Dhurandhar reads as remarkably lived-in, and its specificity is one of the reasons the moral stakes land as heavily as they do.

Q: Why is Baby considered a precursor to Dhurandhar?

Neeraj Pandey’s Baby, led by Akshay Kumar, arrived years before Dhurandhar and took espionage seriously at a time when the Hindi intelligence thriller was drifting toward pure spectacle. Pandey was interested in process and competence, in the unglamorous mechanics of how a counterterrorism unit actually operates, and he resisted the superhero register that defines the YRF universe. This makes Baby a clear tonal precursor to Dhurandhar, a film that proved Hindi cinema could treat the spy story with intelligence and restraint. The key difference is scope. Baby operates on a compressed, procedural timeline, dramatizing the danger and difficulty of the work over a short span, while Dhurandhar extends its timeline across a decade and uses that length to explore the corrosion of identity that a brief operation cannot produce. Baby showed that the work is dangerous; Dhurandhar argues that the work is identity-destroying, and that argument required a timescale Baby never attempted. So Baby is rightly seen as paving the way, a serious-minded predecessor whose restraint Dhurandhar inherited and then pushed to a far more ambitious extreme.

Q: Does Dhurandhar criticize the Indian government or intelligence agencies?

Dhurandhar takes a more ambivalent view of the intelligence apparatus than the spectacle films do, but it stops short of outright condemnation, and the distinction matters. The franchise presents the recruitment of its protagonist as a kind of exploitation, showing an agency that identifies a broken young man and converts his grief into a tool, which raises pointed questions about whether the institution preys on the vulnerable people it deploys. This is a more critical stance than the YRF universe, where the agency is essentially a temple staffed by patriots. However, Dhurandhar directs its skepticism at the institution and its methods rather than at the nation or its cause. The film never seriously questions whether the larger enterprise is worth pursuing; its critique is about human cost, not about national legitimacy. This is partly a limit imposed by the patriotic frame within which a mainstream Hindi film must operate, and it marks a boundary that a more radical work in the le Carre mold might cross. So the answer is nuanced: yes, Dhurandhar is willing to show the agency as morally compromised in a way its peers are not, but no, it does not extend that critique to a wholesale questioning of the state.

Q: Which is the better introduction to the franchise, Part 1 or Part 2?

You should watch them in order, beginning with Part 1, because the franchise is constructed as a single continuous arc rather than two standalone films. Part 1 establishes the protagonist’s origin, the wound that makes him into an agent, the slow process of building his cover, and the relationships that will later be detonated. Part 2 pays off everything Part 1 sets up, letting the years of accumulated deception reach their crisis and resolution. Watching Part 2 first would spoil the central transformation and rob the betrayals of their weight, because their devastation depends entirely on the time invested in Part 1. The duology is best understood as one long story split across two installments, with Part 1 functioning as the patient setup and Part 2 as the payoff. This is itself part of what separates the franchise from the open-ended shared universe, where installments can be watched in nearly any order because the character never genuinely changes. Dhurandhar’s protagonist changes profoundly across the two films, which is exactly why the order matters.

Q: How did audiences react to Dhurandhar’s refusal of easy heroism?

The reception was telling, and it disproved a long-held assumption about the Hindi mass audience. Conventional industry wisdom held that audiences at scale wanted only triumphant escapism, that an intelligence thriller had to be a fantasy of invincibility to succeed commercially. Dhurandhar’s strong performance challenged this directly. A film that refused easy pleasure, that asked viewers to sit with discomfort and to feel the cost of the violence it depicted, found a large audience anyway, suggesting that a significant portion of the public was hungry for exactly the seriousness the genre had been withholding. The word of mouth built around the film’s emotional weight rather than in spite of it, indicating that viewers responded to being taken seriously. There was, of course, a segment of the audience that came expecting the clean exhilaration of a spectacle thriller and left unsettled or disappointed, because the film deliberately refused to give them the catharsis they wanted. But the overall pattern showed that the perceived ceiling on what mass audiences would accept was lower than the reality, which is part of why the franchise is seen as a turning point.

Q: What spy thriller tropes does Dhurandhar deliberately avoid?

Dhurandhar systematically declines several of the genre’s most reliable conventions, and the avoidances are deliberate rather than accidental. It avoids the worshipful hero introduction, the slow-motion entrance with swelling music that tells the audience to look up at the protagonist. It avoids the indestructible body, the hero who absorbs injury without genuine consequence. It avoids the faceless henchmen whose deaths carry no moral weight, instead rendering many of its enemies human. It avoids the frictionless romance, the glamorous equal partner who enjoys the adventure without cost. It avoids the righteous-agency framing, presenting the institution as morally compromised instead. And it avoids the open-ended structure that lets the hero return undamaged for the next installment, choosing instead a finite arc that lets consequences stick. Each of these avoidances is connected to the same underlying conviction, which is that espionage has a human cost the glamour picture conveniently ignores. By refusing the tropes that make the genre comfortable, Dhurandhar forces both itself and its audience to confront what the comfortable version leaves out, which is the price the agent pays.

Q: Is Dhurandhar a patriotic film?

Dhurandhar is patriotic, but in a more complicated register than the flag-waving spectacle thrillers, and the complication is part of its interest. The franchise clearly operates within a patriotic frame; its protagonist serves the Indian state, the enemy is drawn from the history of cross-border conflict, and the film does not question the fundamental legitimacy of the nation’s cause. In that sense it belongs to the same broad patriotic tradition as its peers. But its patriotism is shadowed by an awareness of cost that the spectacle films lack. Where Pathaan or Tiger offers patriotism as pure triumph, Dhurandhar offers patriotism as sacrifice, insisting that the audience reckon with what the nation extracts from the people who serve it. The film asks viewers to feel pride and discomfort simultaneously, to support the work while recognizing that it consumes a human being. This is a more mature form of patriotism, one that honors service by refusing to pretend it is free. So yes, Dhurandhar is patriotic, but it is patriotism with a conscience, which is rarer and harder than the celebratory version.

Q: How does the violence in Dhurandhar compare to other Bollywood action films?

The violence in Dhurandhar differs from mainstream Bollywood action less in quantity than in meaning. Most Hindi action films, including the spectacle spy thrillers, present violence as pleasure: the editing, scoring, and framing all work to make lethal force feel triumphant, and the audience is invited to cheer each kill. Dhurandhar refuses this almost entirely. Its violence is framed to feel like a wound rather than a victory, the camera holding on the act longer than comfort allows, the men who die rendered human enough that their deaths register as losses. The film does not give the audience permission to enjoy the killing, including the killing its own protagonist commits. This connects to a tradition of serious cinema that treats violence as a moral catastrophe rather than a sport, the tradition of films that want the viewer to feel some version of what the killer feels, which is sick. So while Dhurandhar may not contain dramatically more or less violence than a typical action film, the violence it does contain is engineered to produce an entirely different emotional response, one of unease rather than exhilaration.

Q: Could the YRF Spy Universe ever make a film like Dhurandhar?

Structurally, it could not, and the reasons are instructive. The YRF universe is built on an open-ended architecture that requires its protagonists to survive each film intact and ready for the next installment. A film like Dhurandhar depends on the opposite premise, a finite arc that lets the work genuinely consume the agent and lets the consequences become permanent. A shared universe cannot allow its anchor characters to be used up, because a used-up hero is useless to a franchise that needs him back. This means the spectacle universe is structurally barred from telling Dhurandhar’s story, not because of any lack of talent or budget, but because its very business model enforces the weightlessness that Dhurandhar rejects. A YRF film could certainly become darker or more serious in tone, and the industry may well move in that direction. But it could not fully replicate Dhurandhar’s achievement without abandoning the perpetual-motion structure that defines it, which would mean ceasing to be a shared universe at all. The finitude is not a stylistic choice that could be borrowed; it is the philosophical foundation of the entire approach.

Q: What does Dhurandhar suggest about the future of the Bollywood spy genre?

Dhurandhar puts a choice on the table that the Hindi intelligence thriller had largely avoided, the choice between espionage as adventure and espionage as tragedy. For years the genre chose adventure almost exclusively, localizing the Bond fantasy for an audience presumed to want only escapism. Dhurandhar demonstrated that the other choice, the tragic and morally serious vision that world cinema reached decades ago, can succeed at full blockbuster scale with a mass Indian audience. This is significant because it expands the range of what the genre is permitted to attempt. If the industry takes the lesson, the future of the Hindi espionage picture may lie not in bigger stunts and more invincible heroes but in deeper psychological wounds and more honest reckonings with the cost of the work. Whether the industry actually follows is an open question; the escapist model remains immensely profitable and may simply continue alongside the new approach rather than yielding to it. But after Dhurandhar, no one can claim the Hindi espionage picture had to be weightless. It was always a choice, and Dhar proved that a different and more serious choice was commercially viable, which permanently changes the conversation about what the genre can be.

Q: How does Aditya Dhar’s direction in Dhurandhar build on his earlier work?

Aditya Dhar’s career traces a clear progression toward greater ambition and moral complexity, and Dhurandhar represents the fullest expression of that trajectory. His earlier work established him as a director capable of mounting large-scale action with genuine craft and of treating military and intelligence subjects with seriousness rather than pure spectacle. Dhurandhar extends this by pairing that scale with a far more demanding psychological and moral architecture, betting that a blockbuster on the scale of a YRF tentpole can carry the weight of a serious tragedy. The throughline across his films is a commitment to consequence, a refusal to let violence and sacrifice come free, and a conviction that the audience can handle emotional difficulty. What changes from his earlier work to Dhurandhar is the depth and duration of the cost he is willing to dramatize; where earlier films showed sacrifice within bounded events, Dhurandhar extends the reckoning across a decade and lets it consume the protagonist entirely. The evolution suggests a filmmaker increasingly confident that scale and seriousness are partners rather than opposites, and Dhurandhar is the proof of that thesis at its most fully realized.

Q: Why does Dhurandhar end the way it does instead of with a triumphant victory?

Without spoiling the specifics, Dhurandhar ends in a register of cost rather than pure triumph because a triumphant ending would betray everything the franchise spends its running time arguing. The spectacle film ends with vindication, the hero victorious and undimmed, because its entire premise is that heroism is sustainable and the self survives the work. Dhurandhar believes the opposite, that the work consumes the person who attempts it, and an ending that returned the protagonist to wholeness would contradict that belief. The conclusion has to register the permanence of what was paid, because consequences only matter if they are allowed to stick, and the finite duology structure exists precisely to let them stick. So the ending honors the moral architecture of the whole story by refusing the easy catharsis of a clean win. This is the same refusal that defines the franchise at every level, from its handling of heroism to its treatment of violence to its construction of villains as mirrors rather than monsters. The ending is not a failure to deliver satisfaction; it is the final and most important expression of the film’s conviction that a spy story told honestly cannot end in unmixed triumph, because the work does not let anyone walk away whole.

Q: What other Hindi spy films should I watch alongside Dhurandhar?

If Dhurandhar moved you and you want to explore the Hindi spy tradition with fresh eyes, a handful of titles will deepen your appreciation of what Dhar accomplished. Raazi is the essential companion piece, the film that shares Dhurandhar’s true subject of undercover betrayal and approaches it through a woman’s experience over a shorter span. Baby rewards viewing as the serious-minded procedural precursor that proved the genre could resist the spectacle register. The YRF Spy Universe entries, Pathaan, the War films, and the Tiger trilogy, are worth watching precisely as contrast, because understanding what Dhurandhar rejects requires seeing the spectacle model executed at its most polished. Watching these together turns each film into commentary on the others; the spectacle thrillers make Dhurandhar’s seriousness legible, while Dhurandhar makes the spectacle thrillers’ weightlessness visible as a choice rather than a default. A viewer who works through this small cluster comes away with a map of the entire Hindi spy genre, its two competing visions laid out clearly, and a sharper sense of where Dhar positioned himself relative to everything that came before.

Q: Did Dhurandhar face any controversy for its subject matter?

A film that handles cross-border conflict, religious identity, and morally compromised state action was always going to attract scrutiny, and Dhurandhar did generate debate, as ambitious films on sensitive subjects tend to. Part of the discussion centered on its willingness to present the intelligence apparatus as something that exploits its own people, a more critical stance than the reassuring patriotism of the spectacle thrillers, which some viewers found bracing and others found uncomfortable. Part of it concerned the protagonist’s transformation across religious and national lines, a premise loaded with meaning that invites strong reactions. And part of it was the broader and recurring debate about how cinema should handle real traumas and real-world conflict, the line between historical engagement and exploitation. None of this is unusual for a film operating at Dhurandhar’s level of ambition and seriousness; works that take risks invite argument, and the argument is often a sign that the film touched something real. The controversy, such as it was, ultimately reflected the fact that Dhurandhar was attempting more than its spectacle peers, and reaching for more always means risking more.

Q: Is Dhurandhar suitable for viewers who do not usually watch spy thrillers?

In some ways Dhurandhar is more accessible to non-genre viewers than the spectacle thrillers are, precisely because its concerns are human rather than mechanical. A viewer who finds the typical espionage picture cold or repetitive, all gadgets and chases and invincible heroes, may find Dhurandhar more engaging because it is fundamentally a character study about identity, loyalty, and the cost of deception, themes that resonate far beyond the genre. You do not need to love espionage thrillers to be moved by a story about a man who loses himself in a role he can never set down. That said, the film is emotionally demanding and does not offer the easy pleasures that make the genre comfortable; it asks the viewer to sit with discomfort and to feel the weight of what it depicts. So it is well suited to viewers who want substance and are willing to be unsettled, and less suited to those who want pure escapist entertainment. For the right viewer, Dhurandhar may be a gateway that makes the entire genre more interesting, by revealing depths the spectacle model had hidden.

Q: How does the music in Dhurandhar serve its anti-spectacle approach?

The score functions very differently from the triumphant, propulsive music that drives the spectacle thrillers, and the difference supports the film’s whole approach. In the YRF universe, music is an engine of exhilaration, swelling at every heroic beat to tell the audience when to feel triumphant and turning the action into something closer to a celebration. Dhurandhar uses music more sparingly and more ambiguously, often as a vehicle for the protagonist’s unspoken interior life rather than as a cue for the audience to cheer. Where the spectacle film’s music affirms, Dhurandhar’s score frequently unsettles, holding back the cathartic release the genre conditions viewers to expect. The absence of triumphant scoring at moments where another film would deploy it is part of how Dhurandhar refuses to let its violence feel good; without the music telling the audience to celebrate, the killing registers as a wound. This restraint is consistent with the film’s larger conviction that espionage is tragedy rather than adventure, and the music, by declining to glorify, becomes one more way the franchise insists on the seriousness of what it shows.

Q: Will there be more films in the Dhurandhar franchise after the duology?

The duology is structured as a complete and finite arc, which is itself central to its meaning, so any continuation would face a real tension with the franchise’s own logic. The entire philosophical premise of Dhurandhar is that the work consumes the agent and that consequences are permanent, a premise expressed through the closed two-part structure that lets the story genuinely end. An open-ended franchise that kept returning to the same protagonist would risk the very weightlessness Dhurandhar was built to reject, because a hero who keeps coming back cannot be a hero the work truly used up. That does not rule out the possibility of the world being expanded in other directions, through stories about different characters or different operations within the same universe, which could preserve the franchise’s seriousness without undoing its central arc. But a direct continuation of the original protagonist’s story would be difficult to reconcile with the finality the duology so deliberately achieves. The most likely path, if the world continues, would be expansion rather than extension, new stories rather than a reset of the one that has already reached its proper and permanent end.

Q: How does Dhurandhar handle the moral ambiguity that the spectacle films avoid?

The spectacle thrillers keep their moral universe simple by design, because complexity would interfere with the clean pleasure they offer. Their heroes are unambiguously good, their enemies unambiguously bad, and the violence between them carries no residue. Dhurandhar deliberately muddies all of this. Its protagonist commits acts that are difficult to defend, betrays people who showed him real kindness, and emerges morally compromised rather than vindicated. Its enemies are humanized to the point where their destruction reads as loss rather than triumph. Its institution is shown exploiting the vulnerable man it recruits. The film refuses to resolve these tensions into a comfortable verdict, leaving the audience to sit with the discomfort of supporting a cause whose human cost it has been forced to see. This embrace of ambiguity is the clearest marker of Dhurandhar’s seriousness and its kinship with the tragic spy tradition. The spectacle film tells the audience exactly how to feel; Dhurandhar trusts the audience to hold contradictory feelings at once, to feel pride and revulsion together, and that trust is precisely what elevates it above the genre’s comfortable defaults.

Q: What is the single biggest difference between Dhurandhar and every other Bollywood spy film?

If the entire comparison had to be reduced to one sentence, it would be this: every other major Bollywood espionage story believes the self survives the work, and Dhurandhar believes the work consumes the self. Every other difference flows from this single disagreement. Because the spectacle films believe the hero remains intact, they can make him invincible, let his violence feel triumphant, keep his romances frictionless, treat his enemies as disposable, and run his story forever across an open-ended franchise. Because Dhurandhar believes the work destroys the person who does it, it must make its hero vulnerable, let his violence wound, poison his intimacies, humanize his enemies, and end his story in a finite arc that lets the destruction become permanent. The two visions are internally coherent and mutually exclusive, built on opposite answers to the most basic question a spy story can ask, which is whether a human being can give themselves to deception and remain whole. The spectacle film says yes and builds a fantasy on that yes. Dhurandhar says no and builds a tragedy on that no, and in saying no it became the most morally serious espionage story Hindi cinema has produced.