The question is not whether Dhurandhar is a better spy film than Pathaan. Better is the wrong word, and the wrong question, because the two films are not playing the same game. Pathaan is a celebration of invincibility wrapped in the grammar of international espionage. Dhurandhar is a decade-long psychological siege wrapped in the grammar of betrayal and survival. Placing them side by side is genuinely useful only if the comparison is organized around what each film believes espionage fundamentally is, because on that foundational question, they give answers so different that it is worth asking whether they belong to the same genre at all.

That is the argument this article makes: Dhurandhar is not an evolution of the Bollywood spy thriller. It is a refusal of the genre’s fundamental premise. The mainstream Bollywood spy film, from Ek Tha Tiger through Tiger 3 and from War through War 2, is built on a compact with its audience: the hero is extraordinary, the danger is real enough to generate excitement but never real enough to break him, and the mission ends with triumph that justifies every cost. Dhurandhar offers the audience no such compact. It offers them instead the unromantic proposition that espionage is not about heroes at all. It is about the systematic destruction of a person’s identity in service of a strategic objective, and the only question worth asking is how much of the person survives the operation.

The genre Dhurandhar belongs to most naturally has no established Bollywood home. The psychological spy thriller, the kind that John le Carre spent his career defining in literary fiction and that filmmakers like Tomas Alfredson and Park Chan-wook have translated to screen, is built on the premise that the spy’s primary adversary is not the enemy operative across the table but the institutional logic that deployed him in the first place. The enemy across the table is the mission. The institution that built and sent the spy is the existential threat. Le Carre’s George Smiley survives multiple novels without ever fully trusting the people who employ him, and his survival is predicated on this distrust. Hamza Ali Mazari, the operative at the center of the Dhurandhar franchise, is a younger and less terminally disillusioned version of the same archetype: a man who serves the institution faithfully while the institution’s capacity to comprehend what it is asking of him remains fundamentally limited.

Why does this comparison to literary and international cinema matter for an article about Bollywood spy films? Because the comparison is what Dhurandhar itself is making. The franchise does not exist in a vacuum; it is in constant dialogue with the spy films that preceded it in Hindi cinema and with the international tradition of espionage cinema that the Hindi industry has been in conversation with, usually at a distance, since the genre began to coalesce in the 1970s. Aditya Dhar has been explicit in interviews about the films and fiction that informed his franchise’s construction. The le Carre influence is not incidental. It is constitutional. And understanding the nature and limits of that influence requires holding Dhurandhar against both its Bollywood predecessors and its international reference points simultaneously.

This is why comparing Dhurandhar to Pathaan and War and Tiger is genuinely illuminating even though the comparison might initially seem like placing a Kurosawa film next to a Marvel movie. The YRF Spy Universe and the Dhurandhar franchise are not made by people who inhabit different creative universes. They are made by people who have watched the same films, who compete for the same audience, and who have made different choices about what the spy thriller genre owes its viewers. Those choices have political, cultural, and commercial implications that the comparison makes legible. And the commercial record, which you can explore through the franchise’s complete box office data to see exactly how both models have performed against each other in the marketplace, suggests that the audience is more sophisticated in its appetites than the industry’s conventional wisdom had assumed.

The Surface Parallel

Every film in the Bollywood spy conversation shares a basic set of narrative ingredients. There is an Indian intelligence agency (usually RAW, occasionally IB or a fictional equivalent). There is a field agent who operates undercover in hostile territory. There is a mission with national security stakes. There is violence, physical and often spectacular. And there is, almost always, an adversary who is implicitly or explicitly Pakistani, or connected to Pakistan-based terror networks.

These ingredients are shared by Ek Tha Tiger, Tiger Zinda Hai, Tiger 3, Pathaan, War, War 2, Baby, A Wednesday (which is not a spy film but occupies adjacent counter-terrorism territory), and Dhurandhar. The shared ingredients are what make the comparison feel natural. A viewer who loved Pathaan might naturally migrate to Dhurandhar, and a reviewer who dislikes what Dhurandhar represents politically might lump it in with the nationalist action films of the same era.

But shared ingredients do not make a shared film. The recipe is the same. What each chef does with it is the point.

The YRF Spy Universe, as Yash Raj Films has branded it, treats the spy thriller as the Indian equivalent of a Marvel film. The agent has superpowers that happen to be framed as training rather than radioactive spider bites. Tiger (Salman Khan) does not merely defeat opponents; he defeats them with a kind of effortless physical poetry that signals to the audience that no real threat to his body will ever materialize. Kabir (Hrithik Roshan in War) is even more explicitly superheroic: the film spends more time on the spectacle of his physicality than on any psychological dimension he might possess. Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan) is a walking brand revival, a cultural event dressed as a film, and the espionage is scaffolding for the icon’s return rather than the substance of the story.

Baby, directed by Neeraj Pandey, is different enough from the YRF template to deserve its own position in the analysis. It takes counter-terrorism seriously as a procedural matter, strips away the romance and the glamour, and builds something resembling a realistic operational thriller. But Baby operates in compressed, procedural time: the mission is measured in weeks, and the film’s emotional architecture is that of a ticking clock rather than a slow burn. Dhurandhar operates across a decade.

Raazi is closer to Dhurandhar than any other Indian film in this conversation, and the comparison is the most instructive because both films send an Indian undercover agent into Pakistani society, both agents build genuine emotional bonds with the people they are meant to betray, and both films are interested in the moral cost of that betrayal. The difference is one of scale, duration, and, as the article will argue, gender: the spy’s experience in Raazi and the spy’s experience in Dhurandhar are so differently inflected by the gender of the protagonist that the comparison becomes a lesson in how much the same mission changes depending on who is asked to perform it.

The gender dimension deserves more than a parenthetical acknowledgment. Sehmat’s cover in Raazi requires performing femininity in a specific cultural and domestic context: she must be a dutiful daughter-in-law, a loving wife, a woman whose presence is legible and non-threatening within the household hierarchy that the Pakistani military family maintains. The surveillance she conducts is done in the margins of domesticity, in the spaces her gender grants her access to precisely because it renders her invisible to the men who hold institutional power. Her cover is, in this sense, built from her gender’s social meaning: she is safe because she is assumed to be harmless, and her assignment exploits that assumption systematically. The moral horror of Raazi is that the people whose trust she betrays are precisely the people who extended it most fully, because her cover required them to.

Hamza’s cover in Dhurandhar works by different mechanisms. He does not exploit assumptions of harmlessness. He constructs an identity from the ground up: a name, a religion, a cultural fluency, a biography, a network of relationships that have to be built through active performance rather than assumed through social position. The difference is the difference between passing and becoming. Sehmat passes as something she partially is, a woman from a patriotic family, adjusted for context. Hamza becomes something he is not at all, in a world that is not his, over a duration that Sehmat’s mission never approached. This distinction is not a value judgment about which mission is harder or which film is better. It is an observation about why the same genre framework produces such different emotional and moral experiences depending on the specific form of the deception it examines.

To understand what Dhurandhar is doing that none of these films do, the analysis must move through specific analytical dimensions rather than through the films themselves in sequence. The comparison is most productive when it asks: how does each film define heroism, what does each film do with the spy’s body, what does each film ask the audience to feel about violence, and how does each film handle the passage of time?

It is worth pausing on one more film before the analytical dimensions begin, because it sits outside the obvious comparisons and is often overlooked in discussions of the Bollywood spy genre: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider. Haider is not a spy film in the operational sense, but its central character, a young Kashmiri man returning to a homeland transformed by conflict and disappearance, navigates a world of surveillance, betrayal, and institutional violence that shares significant DNA with the world Dhurandhar constructs. More relevantly, Haider treats its protagonist’s psychological disintegration with the same seriousness and the same patience that Dhurandhar applies to Hamza’s identity dissolution. Both films are ultimately about what happens to a person’s sense of self when the environment they inhabit is defined by systematic deception and state violence. The comparison between Haider and Dhurandhar is not a genre comparison. It is a thematic one, and it suggests that the best Indian cinema about the relationship between the individual and the violent state, regardless of whether it labels itself a spy film, has been circling the same set of questions that Dhurandhar addresses more directly than any of its strict genre predecessors.

The shared surface features of the Bollywood spy genre also include a structural element so consistent across the films that it functions as a genre requirement: the revelation scene. Every spy film in this tradition has a moment where the operative’s cover is at risk of exposure, or where someone discovers who they really are, and the scene is staged as a set piece of tension with the outcome held in suspense. In the YRF films, these scenes are thrilling but not genuinely uncertain: the audience knows Tiger or Pathaan or Kabir will escape, and the pleasure is in watching the escape executed with maximum style. In Baby, the revelation-risk scenes carry more procedural weight: the outcome is less certain because the film has established a more realistic operational context. In Raazi, the revelation scenes are agonizing precisely because the audience’s sympathies are divided: the exposure would be catastrophic for Sehmat but would bring relief to the Pakistani family whose trust she is betraying. In Dhurandhar, the revelation-risk scenes are the franchise’s most psychologically complex moments, because they force the audience to sit with the full weight of what Hamza has built and what its discovery would destroy. The tension is not simply whether he will be caught. It is what it would mean if he were caught now, after this much time, with these relationships at stake. No other Bollywood spy film has made the revelation scene carry this degree of moral and emotional freight, and the difference is a direct consequence of the franchise’s investment in duration and in the humanity of the world its operative inhabits.

Dimension One: How Each Film Defines Heroism

The YRF Spy Universe has an unambiguous theory of heroism that it restates across every installment with minor variations. The hero is superior. He is physically superior (the fight scenes exist to demonstrate this), morally superior (he may bend rules but never breaks ethics), and narratively superior (he always wins, always survives, and always does so in a way that confirms the audience’s admiration). The emotional experience the films offer is the pleasure of identification with an extraordinary person. The audience does not worry about Tiger. They watch Tiger and feel something like pride by proximity.

This model of heroism has a long lineage in Indian popular cinema, running from the angry young men of the 1970s through the romantic heroes of the 1990s and arriving in the spy context via Dhoom and its sequels. It is fundamentally aspirational in register. The films tell the audience: here is what an ideal version of a human being looks like, and that ideal serves the nation.

Baby complicates this model slightly but does not abandon it. Akshay Kumar’s Ajay Kumar in Baby is not glamorous or invincible in the YRF sense; he is efficient, tireless, and professionally ruthless in a way that the film presents as virtue rather than warning sign. The heroism here is not of the flamboyant kind but of the dedicated bureaucratic kind: the hero is effective, and effectiveness is morality. Baby proposes that the right man doing the right job in the right way is all the heroism the nation requires. This is a less romantic model than the YRF template but equally untroubling at its core, because the audience never doubts that Ajay is the hero or that his mission is just.

Raazi does something more interesting. It centers its spy narrative on a woman who has been handed her assignment by her dying father, and who takes it on not out of personal conviction but out of filial loyalty and patriotic duty that she does not fully understand until she is already living inside the consequences of it. Sehmat (Alia Bhatt) is not heroic in the YRF sense. She is not even heroic in Baby’s efficient-professional sense. She is a young woman who does terrible things in a situation she did not choose, and the film holds open the question of whether she is a hero or a victim or something that does not fit either category. The heroism in Raazi is a question, not an assertion.

Dhurandhar takes this questioning instinct further than Raazi and applies it to a male protagonist in a way that changes everything about the audience’s relationship to the character. Hamza Ali Mazari, the operative built from the bones of Jaskirat Singh Rangi, is not heroic in any conventional sense during the large majority of the franchise’s runtime. He is effective, sometimes. He is calculating, always. He is a man who has learned to suppress every authentic impulse he has, and who has been suppressing them for so long that the suppression has become its own identity. The question the franchise keeps posing is not whether Hamza will succeed but whether there is still a Jaskirat somewhere inside Hamza who can survive the mission even if the mission succeeds.

This is a genuinely different theory of heroism from anything the Bollywood spy film had previously attempted. The YRF hero is defined by what he can do. Baby’s hero is defined by what he is willing to do. Raazi’s heroine is defined by what she does even though she is not sure she should. Hamza is defined by what he has already lost and what it would cost him to recover it. The heroism, if it exists at all, is retrospective: you can only assess whether Hamza was a hero once you know what was left of Jaskirat at the end.

This matters for the genre in a specific way. Aditya Dhar’s filmmaking philosophy has always been interested in the institutional dimension of individual sacrifice: his debut feature, Uri: The Surgical Strike, was about soldiers who had been given an assignment by the state and performed it with professional precision, and the film’s emotional power came from the gap between the scale of what the institution asked and the smallness of what the individuals received in return. Dhurandhar expands this institutional critique into something more uncomfortable. The RAW handlers who run Operation Dhurandhar are not villains, but they are also not the audience’s moral anchors. They are administrators of sacrifice, men who see assets and liabilities where the audience sees a human being. The heroism the franchise ultimately locates, if any, is not in the operation’s success but in whatever Hamza manages to preserve of himself despite the operation.

The YRF films would not know what to do with this definition of heroism. Baby would find it philosophically confusing. Raazi would recognize it, because Sehmat’s journey is also about what is preserved and what is destroyed in the service of an assignment. But Raazi tells this story across two hours and reaches an ending that, for all its tragedy, is formally conclusive. Dhurandhar stretches it across the better part of six hours and refuses to conclude anything neatly, because the franchise’s argument is that the psychological damage of deep-cover work does not conclude. It compounds.

There is one more figure worth placing in this heroism comparison, and it sits outside Indian cinema entirely: George Smiley, le Carre’s recurring protagonist and the paradigmatic anti-hero of literary espionage. Smiley is not physically imposing. He is not charismatic. He is, in fact, deliberately constructed as the anti-Bond: a man whose every personal quality is a form of invisibility, whose success as an intelligence officer comes from his capacity to efface himself so completely that the people he is studying never notice they are being studied. What makes Smiley heroic, in the le Carre world, is his willingness to absorb institutional betrayal without losing his capacity for moral reasoning. He is used, manipulated, and discarded by the institution he serves, and yet he continues to serve it because the alternative, which is to abandon the moral framework that makes service meaningful, is worse than the abuse the institution inflicts.

Hamza is not Smiley, and Dhurandhar is not a le Carre adaptation, but the heroism template is closer to Smiley than to Tiger. What Hamza has, which Tiger and Pathaan and Kabir and Ajay Kumar do not, is the quality of moral endurance: the capacity to continue functioning under conditions that would destroy a conventional hero’s foundations. He is not more powerful than his predecessors in the Bollywood spy galaxy. He is more damaged, and the franchise proposes that the damage is what earns him the title of hero, if the title applies at all. The audience watching Dhurandhar is not asked to admire Hamza in the way an audience admires Tiger. They are asked to recognize him as a person doing something terrible to himself in service of something he cannot fully evaluate. That recognition is a different and, the franchise argues, more honest form of heroism than anything the YRF model has produced.

Dimension Two: The Role of the Body

No element of the Bollywood spy thriller more cleanly separates Dhurandhar from its predecessors than what each film does with the spy’s physical body, because every other film in the genre uses the body as a site of spectacle, while Dhurandhar uses it as a site of evidence.

In the YRF Spy Universe, the body is an instrument of display. The fight sequences in Tiger Zinda Hai, in War, in Pathaan, are choreographed to showcase physical possibility at its most extreme. The camera loves what these bodies can do: the aerial kicks, the car-to-helicopter transfers, the hand-to-hand combat against multiple opponents in which the hero never seems to tire, never seems to hurt, and never seems to be in genuine danger of losing. The physical beauty of the YRF action sequences is not incidental. It is the genre’s central pleasure. The audience goes to these films partly to see extraordinary bodies doing extraordinary things, and the films deliver this with technical polish that is genuinely impressive at the level of craft.

The body in Baby is less about display and more about competency. Ajay Kumar’s physicality in Neeraj Pandey’s film is not glamorous. It is purposeful, contained, and efficient. When Baby’s operatives move through a Lahore bazaar or a Riyadh safehouse, the camera watches them with something like professional respect rather than aesthetic admiration. The action in Baby is functional. It advances the mission rather than pausing the mission to celebrate the hero’s capabilities. This is a meaningful distinction from the YRF template, but Baby’s body remains an instrument of effectiveness rather than anything more vulnerable.

Raazi handles the body in a way that is genuinely distinctive within the Indian spy genre. Sehmat’s body is a site of performance rather than capability: she must present herself as a certain kind of woman (submissive, decorative, non-threatening) to survive inside the Pakistani military household, and the film is attentive to the performance art of gender as disguise. When Sehmat moves through her cover life, the audience watches her body not for what it can do in a fight but for whether it is successfully signaling what it needs to signal. The tension is not physical but semiotic. The body is a text being read by people who would kill her if they decoded it correctly.

Dhurandhar borrows Raazi’s understanding of the body as performance and expands it across a decade. Hamza’s body is a long-term disguise that must function flawlessly at every moment, in every interaction, across years of daily performance. The film is interested in what this extended performance does to a person physically and psychologically. Ranveer Singh plays the character’s physical transformation from Jaskirat to Hamza with a specificity that the film rewards with close attention: Singh’s performance registers the accumulated weight of years of suppression in his posture, in the pace of his speech, in the way his eyes move through a room. Hamza walks differently from Jaskirat. He holds his body differently. He has learned, at the cellular level, how Hamza’s body occupies space, and there are scenes in Part 1 where you can see the terrible effort required to maintain that occupation.

But Dhurandhar’s most striking departure from its predecessors comes in how it handles violence against Hamza’s body. The YRF spy takes damage that he shrugs off within the same scene. Baby’s operative absorbs punishment and continues the mission. Dhurandhar does something none of the others do: it makes violence against the hero’s body accumulate narratively. When Hamza is beaten in Part 1, the beating leaves marks that the film refers back to. When he is hurt, the hurt is not erased by the next scene’s competent action. The body in Dhurandhar is a historical record of everything the mission has cost, and the action sequences in both films are staged with this in mind. You can examine the day-wise commercial impact of these films and find something revealing: Dhurandhar’s box office legs, its sustained holdover well into Week 3 and beyond, reflect an audience returning not for the action highs but for the character’s ongoing cost. People went back to see Hamza survive, not to see him win.

There is a shot in Part 1 that crystallizes the franchise’s philosophy about the body better than any description can fully convey: Hamza is in a bathroom mirror confrontation with himself, the kind of scene that dozens of spy films have staged as a moment of dramatic steeling. But Dhar frames it without the conventional dramaturgy. There is no inspirational music rising on the soundtrack, no triumphant squaring of the jaw. Hamza looks at himself for a long moment, and what the scene asks is not whether he is ready for what comes next. It asks whether he can still recognize the person looking back at him. The body, here, is not a weapon or a tool or a text. It is evidence of what the state has done to a volunteer.

No other Bollywood spy film has staged this question. The YRF films would never ask it, because it would undermine the entire emotional architecture they are built on. Baby does not ask it, because the film’s moral framework treats the operative’s personal cost as irrelevant to the mission’s righteousness. Raazi comes closest to asking it, because Sehmat’s final scenes carry the weight of a person who has survived her assignment but not herself. But Raazi’s ending places this cost in the past tense, as a tragedy that has occurred and been endured. Dhurandhar unfolds this question in real time across both films, refusing to let the audience defer it to a denouement.

Dimension Three: What the Audience Is Asked to Feel About Violence

The violence question is where the genre comparison becomes most revealing about the cultural work these films are doing, because every entry in the Bollywood spy conversation uses violence as a primary narrative and emotional tool, but each film has a different theory about what that violence should feel like to the audience.

Before examining each film individually, it is worth acknowledging what the CBFC certificate on each film signals about its relationship to violence. Dhurandhar received an A certificate, restricting it to adult audiences, which is unusual for a Bollywood film with mainstream blockbuster aspirations. The YRF films typically receive U/A certificates that keep them accessible to the widest possible family audience. This difference is not incidental to the creative choices being analyzed. A filmmaker who accepts an A certificate is making a statement about the kind of violence they intend to portray: violence that is not suitable for children is, by definition, violence that the filmmaker believes should feel adult in its emotional register. Aditya Dhar did not stumble into the A certificate. He built a franchise around violence that earns it, violence that is consequential and visceral enough that the experience of watching it should not be available to everyone regardless of age. The certificate is a genre statement before the film even begins.

The YRF Spy Universe treats violence as entertainment. This is not a criticism; it is a description. The fight sequences in Pathaan and War are designed to produce pleasure: the kinetic pleasure of watching exceptional choreography, the competitive pleasure of watching the hero outperform the villain, and the narrative pleasure of watching obstacles dissolved by superior force. The violence in these films does not linger. It does not have aftermath. The enemy falls and the scene moves on. The audience is invited to enjoy this, and enjoy it they do, which is both a testament to the films’ craft and a clear indicator of their moral ambition, which is modest and is meant to be.

Consider the specific staging of victory in each franchise’s signature action sequences. In War, when Kabir defeats his adversary in the film’s climactic confrontation, the sequence is scored, lit, and framed as an aesthetic triumph: the composition is beautiful, the music swells, and the camera ensures the audience can read victory on the hero’s face before cutting to the consequence. In Pathaan, the final battle is staged as a spectacle of resolution: every blow lands with the satisfying clarity of a problem being solved. The violence is not just justified within the narrative. It is endorsed by the film’s entire formal apparatus. The audience leaves these scenes feeling, rightly within the film’s own terms, that the right outcome has been achieved by the right person in the right way. This is the YRF violence compact, and it is extremely effective at delivering what it promises.

Baby complicates this emotional relationship with violence but stops short of making it uncomfortable. The violence in Neeraj Pandey’s film is presented as justified: these are terrorists who have planned or executed mass murder, and the operatives who neutralize them are performing a necessary service. Baby asks the audience to feel something like grim satisfaction at this necessity, not the sheer fun of the YRF action but something more sober. The film makes the implicit argument that some violence is not merely justified but righteous, and it does not examine that argument closely enough to introduce doubt. The audience leaves Baby feeling that the right people did the right thing, which is a form of moral comfort the film earns through procedural credibility.

Raazi makes the audience feel something it is not prepared for. Sehmat commits acts in the film that are formally acts of violence in service of the mission, and the film refuses to let those acts feel clean. The most devastating moment in Raazi is not a physical fight but an act of betrayal that causes death, and the film sits in the aftermath of that death for long enough that the audience cannot simply process it as a narrative inevitability and move on. Gulzar is making a specific argument: that there is no such thing as clean violence in service of national interest, only violence that the nation benefits from and the individual pays for. Raazi is the first Bollywood spy film to make the audience feel implicated in the violence rather than delighted by it.

Dhurandhar takes this implication further and applies it to a different register. The violence in the franchise, across both films, is not primarily between Hamza and enemies in set-piece confrontations. The violence that matters in Dhurandhar is more diffuse and more disturbing: it is the violence of sustained psychological deception, the slow-motion destruction of real human relationships for strategic purposes, and the physical violence that punctuates this sustained damage has a different quality from anything in the YRF films or even from Baby. When Hamza hurts someone in Dhurandhar, the scene does not end. The camera stays. The aftermath is required viewing. The audience is not permitted to experience violence as spectacle and move on to the next plot point.

The Lyari fight sequences, particularly in Part 1, are staged without the choreographic elegance of the YRF films. The combat is ugly, functional, and painful-looking. Bodies do not fall with cinematic grace. They fall with the weight that bodies have in reality. Dhar is making a choice here that is the opposite of the YRF choice: where the YRF films beautify violence to make it pleasurable, Dhar degrades violence to make it honest. The audience is not invited to enjoy these scenes in the way they enjoy a Pathaan or a War action sequence. They are invited to absorb them.

The body question also extends to how each franchise handles the physical transformation of its leading actor. Ranveer Singh’s transformation for Dhurandhar is one of the most discussed and analyzed actor-preparation stories in recent Bollywood history, and for good reason: the shift from Jaskirat to Hamza is registered not just in Singh’s physical appearance but in the entire bearing and economy of his performance. The YRF franchise demands different physical transformations: Salman Khan’s Tiger body is a body of maximum, a body designed to signal power and invincibility through mass and capability. Hrithik Roshan’s War body is a body of aestheticized perfection. These are legitimate artistic choices within their register. But they are bodies that signal arrival, bodies that say I am here and I am exceptional. Singh’s Hamza body signals disappearance: it is a body that has learned to take up less space, to move without calling attention to itself, to be present without being remarkable. This is a physically demanding performance in a way that is almost the inverse of what the YRF films demand: where the YRF actor must maximize their physical presence, Singh must minimize his. The discipline required for this kind of self-erasure is, arguably, more demanding than the discipline required for the YRF model of peak physicality, and the franchise’s commercial success is in part a vindication of an audience that recognized and rewarded the harder choice.

There is also a category of violence that exists only in Dhurandhar and is absent from every other film in this comparison: moral violence. The damage that Hamza does to Yalina, who believes she knows who he is, who has built her life around a version of him that is entirely fabricated, is a form of violence that the film tracks with the same seriousness it gives to physical confrontation. This violence produces no box office highlight reel moment. It cannot be choreographed or enhanced by sound design. It can only be felt, and the franchise earns the feeling through two films of patient preparation. When you track collection trends for both installments and see how Dhurandhar’s Part 2 opening exceeded every reasonable industry projection, part of the explanation lies here: audiences had spent two years processing the moral weight of what Part 1 had asked them to feel, and they returned to Part 2 not for resolution but for reckoning.

The question of what the audience is asked to feel about violence is also, ultimately, a question about the political meaning of these films. The YRF films ask the audience to feel pride and excitement at Indian state violence against enemies of the nation. Baby asks the audience to feel grim satisfaction at the efficiency of counter-terrorism. Raazi asks the audience to feel the cost behind the headline. Dhurandhar asks the audience to feel all of this simultaneously and to hold the contradiction: the operation was necessary, the violence was real, the cost was paid by a specific person, and the nation for which that person paid will not fully understand or acknowledge what it received. This is a more honest account of state violence than Bollywood had previously offered, and it lands differently on an audience.

One comparison that illuminates the franchise’s specific relationship to screen violence is Hollywood’s evolution away from the Bond model. The Roger Moore era of Bond, and even portions of the Pierce Brosnan era, treated violence with the same spectacular lightness that the YRF Spy Universe currently employs: enemies dispatched with wit, collateral damage minimized by narrative convention, and the hero’s body preserved for the next set piece. The transition that Hollywood went through with the Daniel Craig Bond films, and that directors like Paul Greengrass accomplished with the Bourne franchise, involved making violence painful, unglamorous, and consequential. When Bourne takes a beating in a Berlin safehouse, the beating stays on his body for scenes afterward. When Craig’s Bond falls from a crumbling building in Skyfall, the fall is visually registered as an event that should have ended his career if not his life.

Dhurandhar is doing what Craig-era Bond and the Bourne films did for Hollywood: it is insisting on the gravity that the previous model had systematically eliminated. And it is doing so within a Bollywood commercial framework that has not historically tolerated that kind of gravity at the box office level. The fact that it succeeded commercially where every precedent suggested it should struggle is the franchise’s most significant achievement at the level of genre history. It demonstrated that the Indian audience’s appetite for glamorized violence coexists with an appetite for honest violence, and that the two appetites can be served by the same film if the filmmaking is skilled enough to hold both modes in productive tension.

Dimension Four: How Each Film Handles Time

The role of time in a spy narrative is not merely structural; it is philosophical. How long the mission takes, and how a film handles that duration, tells you everything about what the film believes espionage fundamentally is.

The YRF films compress time almost entirely. Tiger’s missions are measured in days. Pathaan unfolds in what feels like an extended weekend of global travel. War runs its operation in weeks at most. The compression is intentional: these films are built on momentum, on the forward propulsion of the plot, and extended time would drain the hero of his invincibility by exposing him to boredom, doubt, and the accumulation of psychological wear that long-term deception produces. The YRF spy exists outside normal time. He does not get tired, not really. He does not get lonely, not in the way that builds over years. He operates in a perpetual present tense of action, and time passing is only registered through the occasional cut to a calendar or a line of dialogue establishing that weeks have elapsed.

Baby is more honest about time but still uses compressed timescales. The investigation in Baby tracks across months rather than days, and Pandey’s direction respects the procedural reality that intelligence operations require patience and multiple moving parts. But Baby’s time is experienced as urgency rather than duration: every scene adds to the clock rather than slowing it, and the cumulative effect is of a sprint that happens to be long rather than a marathon that requires a different relationship to pace.

Raazi handles time with more sensitivity than either the YRF films or Baby. Sehmat’s cover marriage unfolds over months, and the film is attentive to the way those months build something real: genuine affection for her husband and his family, genuine guilt about what she is preparing to do to them. Gulzar measures this time in domestic increments, in meals and prayers and small kindnesses that accumulate into something the audience recognizes as a life. When Sehmat betrays that life, the film has made the audience understand what is being betrayed by letting them watch it grow. Time, in Raazi, is an ethical apparatus. The longer Sehmat lives inside her cover, the more the film makes her betrayal feel like murder.

Dhurandhar is the first Indian spy film to take a decade seriously. Not to tell us that a decade passed, the way a title card might announce a time jump, but to make the audience feel what a decade of sustained performance does to a person. The franchise accomplishes this through a combination of structural choices, casting choices (Ranveer Singh’s physical transformation is not merely cosmetic), and writing choices (the script trusts that an audience willing to spend six hours with these characters can be trusted to register the weight of accumulated years). The Hamza we meet in the later stretches of Part 1 is demonstrably a different person from the Jaskirat who was recruited, and the difference is not merely cosmetic. The way he moves through a room, the speed at which he calculates risk, the ease with which he performs warmth he does not feel: these are all things a decade of practice has made automatic. And the film understands, as no other Bollywood spy film has understood, that automaticity is its own kind of tragedy.

The Jaskirat origin story is the franchise’s way of establishing the baseline before time does its work. Once we understand who Jaskirat was before the operation, every scene of Hamza operating with fluent Pakistani cultural fluency becomes a measurement of the distance traveled. Time, in Dhurandhar, is not a dramatic device. It is the franchise’s central argument: that the kind of espionage Operation Dhurandhar represents is not possible in compressed timescales, and that the psychological toll that makes it horrifying is inseparable from the duration that makes it effective.

This is where the le Carre comparison is most exact. In le Carre’s fiction, time is always the operative fact. Bill Haydon’s long-term penetration of the Circus in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is devastating precisely because of how many years it covered, how many people it damaged, how many institutional decisions it distorted. The temporal dimension is what makes the betrayal feel comprehensive rather than episodic. Dhurandhar understands this. The YRF films do not need to understand it, because they are not making the same argument about espionage. Baby gestures toward it. Raazi uses it as an emotional tool. Dhurandhar builds its entire moral architecture on it.

The implications of this temporal commitment extend into the franchise’s relationship with its audience. Every film discussed in this comparison asks for a specific duration of the audience’s attention and expects a specific kind of engagement during that duration. A War or a Pathaan asks for approximately two and a half hours of alert, entertained, kinetically engaged attention: the films are designed to hold the viewer’s forward momentum, to fill every minute with something interesting enough that no gap appears in which the audience might think critically about what they are being asked to feel. The films are well-engineered for this purpose, and the engineering is sophisticated.

Dhurandhar asks for something different: it asks for patience. This is not a virtue that the Bollywood commercial film traditionally demands of its audience, and it is a significant creative risk. There are stretches in Part 1 where the primary dramatic activity is the observation of Hamza operating routinely within his cover. He goes to the market. He has a meal with Rehman. He navigates a social encounter that carries the implied threat of exposure but does not escalate into confrontation. These scenes are building something that will matter enormously later, but they require the audience to trust that the accumulation is purposeful, which is a form of trust that the YRF spy film has never asked for and that Baby asked for in limited quantities.

The audience’s willingness to extend this trust is, in retrospect, one of the most remarkable commercial facts about the franchise. The Hindi-speaking audience, for whom the spy thriller genre had primarily meant YRF spectacle and Baby-adjacent proceduralism, sat with Dhurandhar’s patience in numbers that no industry analyst had projected. The repeat viewership that drove the franchise’s sustained box office holds was, at least in part, an audience returning to rewatch the slow-burn sections with the knowledge of where they led. Time, in Dhurandhar, rewards re-viewing in a way that the YRF films, which are designed for single-viewing event cinema, do not. This is an audience relationship more typical of literary fiction or prestige television than of commercial Bollywood, and it suggests that the Hindi-speaking audience is more cinematically sophisticated than the industry’s conservative assumptions had credited.

Dimension Five: How Each Film Builds the World the Spy Inhabits

The physical and social world that a spy thriller constructs for its operative to move through is not merely backdrop. It is argument. The way a film builds the enemy territory tells the audience what the film believes about the people who live there, about the nature of the threat, and about the moral status of the spy’s operation. Every film in this comparison makes a choice about the world its agent inhabits, and those choices are among the most revealing differences between the Dhurandhar model and everything that precedes it.

The YRF Spy Universe treats enemy territory as spectacle. When Tiger moves through Istanbul or when Pathaan operates across Vienna and Madrid, the foreign locations function primarily as visual variety and production value signaling. These are beautiful cities rendered beautifully, and the audience is invited to enjoy the aesthetic experience of watching an extraordinary Indian operative move through extraordinary European geography. The local populations are irrelevant: they exist as set dressing or as minor complications that the hero navigates without genuine engagement. The world in YRF spy cinema is a stage, and the stage’s design is optimized for the hero’s performance.

Baby constructs its world differently. Neeraj Pandey’s operational settings, whether they are Lahore bazaars, Saudi mosques, or Turkey safehouses, are built with a documentary credibility that the YRF films do not attempt. The world of Baby feels researched rather than imagined, and this research creates a kind of texture that is absent from the spectacular model. But Baby’s world is still, ultimately, a backdrop: the people who inhabit the operational environment exist primarily as obstacles or instruments for the mission, and the film does not invest in the humanity of the world it portrays beyond what is necessary to make the operation feel plausible.

Raazi does something more interesting with its Pakistani setting. Gulzar’s film makes the genuine and somewhat courageous choice to portray the Pakistani military household in which Sehmat is embedded as a human place: a home with warmth, with family dynamics, with people who are generous and loving and entirely unaware that the young woman they have welcomed into their lives is going to destroy them. This humanization of the enemy’s domestic space is the foundation of Raazi’s moral weight. The audience is not watching a Pakistani villain. They are watching Pakistani people going about their lives, and the tragedy of what Sehmat does to them is amplified by how recognizable those lives feel.

Dhurandhar goes further than Raazi in constructing its world with moral seriousness, and it goes further in a way that is structurally distinct. Where Raazi’s Pakistan is intimate and domestic, centered on a single household, Dhurandhar’s Pakistan is civic and criminal and politically complex. The Karachi underworld that the franchise builds is a fully realized social ecosystem with its own economy, its own hierarchy, its own codes of conduct, and its own human texture. Jameel Jamali is funny. Ulfat is complicated. Rehman Dakait is a human being with a domestic life and a code of loyalty, however criminal the expression of that loyalty. The world of Dhurandhar’s Karachi is not a stage. It is an argument that the enemy’s territory is inhabited by people, not by abstractions, and that the spy who moves through it is doing violence to people, not to narrative obstacles.

This worldbuilding ambition creates a tension that the franchise does not fully resolve. The richer the franchise makes the world Hamza inhabits, the more troubling his mission becomes. Every meal with Rehman, every conversation with Yalina, every moment of genuine warmth that the narrative accumulates in Lyari, makes the operation’s ultimate objectives harder to feel simply good about. Dhurandhar is aware of this tension and exploits it deliberately: the franchise wants the audience to feel the cognitive and moral dissonance of caring about the people that the mission is designed to destroy. But it also, ultimately, resolves the dissonance in favor of the mission, because the 26/11-adjacent climax gives the audience an event catastrophic enough that the operation’s justification becomes incontestable at the emotional level.

This is the franchise’s cleverest narrative structure, and also its most ideologically revealing one. By making the world rich enough to generate genuine moral discomfort, and then releasing that discomfort through a climactic event that retrospectively justifies everything, Dhurandhar has its cake on both sides: it can claim psychological and moral complexity throughout its runtime, and it can deliver the nationalistic catharsis at its ending that the audience came for. Whether this structure is sophisticated or manipulative is a question worth asking, and the controversies around the franchise include critics who argue that the worldbuilding richness is ultimately in service of a very conventional nationalist payoff.

What separates Dhurandhar’s worldbuilding from Baby’s and from the YRF model is not just the density of the portrayal but the film’s commitment to making the audience inhabit the world through Hamza’s perceptions. The franchise uses Hamza’s point of view as an organizing principle for how the audience encounters Karachi: we see it through the eyes of someone who knows he is performing fluency he does not organically possess, someone for whom every interaction carries the risk of exposure, someone who has had to learn a world as a student even as he presents himself to that world as a native. This perspective makes the worldbuilding feel phenomenological rather than scenic. It is not a place the camera visits. It is a place a character lives in under false pretenses, and the falseness changes how every detail of the place feels.

The YRF spy operates in enemy territory with the casual confidence of a tourist. The Baby operative moves through it with professional efficiency. Raazi’s spy inhabits it with anxious performance. Dhurandhar’s spy lives in it for a decade, and the franchise insists that living in a place for a decade, even under false pretenses, changes your relationship to it in ways that no amount of patriotic commitment can fully prevent. By the midpoint of Part 1, Hamza knows Lyari the way a local knows a neighborhood: not just its streets and its faces but its rhythms and its rules, its unspoken codes, its seasonal patterns, its small pleasures. The world has gotten under his skin. And the franchise’s most honest and troubling proposition is that this penetration is not just a professional hazard. It is an inevitable consequence of sustained human presence in any place where human presence happens.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

The comparison between Dhurandhar and its Bollywood peers is instructive, but there is a point at which it stops working, and being clear about where that point lies is as important as the comparison itself.

Dhurandhar is not simply a more serious version of the same genre. At some level, it is a different kind of film that happens to wear the surface clothing of a spy thriller. The YRF films, Baby, and even Raazi are fundamentally genre films: they operate within a recognized set of audience expectations and fulfill or subvert those expectations in ways that produce pleasure or discomfort within a familiar frame. Dhurandhar’s ambitions are, at times, closer to literary fiction than to genre cinema. The franchise is interested in questions, namely what identity survives extreme long-term deception, what the state owes the individual it uses as an instrument, and whether patriotic sacrifice that destroys a person can be meaningfully called noble, that genre films are rarely willing to hold open for six hours without resolving.

This has costs that a fair analysis must acknowledge. The genre comparison breaks down because Dhurandhar, at its most ambitious, loses the genre’s primary virtue: momentum. There are stretches in both films, particularly in Part 1’s middle section, where the drama of sustained deception does not generate the forward-pulling narrative energy that the spy thriller genre normally requires. The audience is asked to invest in the accumulation of psychological texture rather than the escalation of plot, and not every viewer is prepared to make that investment on these terms. The YRF films never lose their audience’s forward momentum. Baby never loses it. Even Raazi, for all its tonal weight, maintains a narrative drive that keeps the audience oriented toward the next scene. Dhurandhar occasionally trusts the texture of duration more than its audience can comfortably follow.

The comparison also breaks down at the level of cultural specificity. Raazi is a film about the relationship between personal loyalty and national identity that works as broadly as it does because the moral dilemma at its center transcends any particular political position. A viewer sympathetic to India, Pakistan, or neither can engage with Sehmat’s predicament as a human being rather than a national representative. Dhurandhar is more unambiguously positioned within a specifically Indian nationalist framework. The films’ sympathy is entirely with the Indian state and its operative; the Pakistanis in the franchise are rendered as enemies or dupes or innocent bystanders, but rarely as people with equivalent moral complexity to the Indian characters. This is a creative choice with political implications that fair-minded viewers will evaluate differently, and the controversies the franchise generated reflect the genuine diversity of those evaluations.

The comparison with global spy cinema, with le Carre particularly, also has a limit. Le Carre’s moral universe is built on the proposition that both sides of any Cold War operation are committing equivalent damage to equivalent people, and that the intelligence bureaucracy is morally indistinguishable from the enemy bureaucracy in its willingness to spend human lives. Dhurandhar does not go this far. The franchise is willing to question the cost to its own operative, but it does not seriously entertain the possibility that Operation Dhurandhar, whatever it costs Hamza, is morally wrong at the operational level. The franchise’s critique is of method and cost, not of purpose. Le Carre’s critique is of purpose itself. This is a meaningful distinction that prevents the le Carre comparison from being complete.

There is also a comparison that never quite applies to any of these films, but that lurks behind the analysis of the most serious entries in the genre: the moral equivalence comparison. A film genuinely committed to interrogating the ethics of state-sponsored espionage would have to ask not just what the operation costs its own agent but what it costs the people on the other side who are used, deceived, or destroyed in the process. Dhurandhar comes closer to this than any YRF film, because the franchise invests in the humanity of characters like Rehman and Yalina in ways that the YRF model never does. But it ultimately does not follow the investment to its most uncomfortable conclusion. The franchise’s sympathy for the people Hamza deceives is real but bounded: it extends far enough to create moral weight but stops short of the point where the audience might begin to question whether the entire operation should have been conducted differently. This boundary is where the genre, even in its most serious Bollywood expression, parts company with the most morally rigorous traditions of literary and cinematic espionage.

What the Comparison Reveals

Placing Dhurandhar alongside Pathaan, War, Tiger, Baby, and Raazi, and examining where it agrees and disagrees with each, reveals something about the moment in Indian cinema that produced these films and the audience expectations they are in dialogue with.

The YRF Spy Universe represents Bollywood’s attempt to build something equivalent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: a branded franchise of interconnected films anchored by charismatic stars and spectacular action, with national mythology serving the function that comic-book mythology serves in Hollywood. This is a coherent and commercially sophisticated project, and its success, measured across films that regularly cross 500 crore domestically, demonstrates that there is a large and enthusiastic audience for exactly this kind of cinema. The YRF films do not fail to engage with psychology or human cost by accident. They do so by design, because psychological complexity and genuine human cost would interfere with the brand’s core proposition: that Indian intelligence officers are superheroes and national heroes and that watching them operate is a form of patriotic pleasure.

Baby represents a different strand of the same nationalist impulse: the operational thriller that derives its pleasure from procedural competence rather than individual spectacle. Neeraj Pandey’s film is sincere in its ambition to depict counter-terrorism as a serious professional undertaking, and it achieves this with enough craft that it found an audience independent of the star-vehicle mechanism. Baby’s influence on Dhurandhar is real, though Aditya Dhar takes the procedural seriousness and attaches it to a longer timeline and a more vulnerable protagonist.

Raazi is, among all the films in this comparison, the one that Dhurandhar’s own themes and symbolism are most in dialogue with, and the dialogue is a productive one. Both films locate their spy thriller’s emotional power in the betrayal of intimacy rather than in the spectacle of violence. Both films ask the audience to care about people who will be destroyed by the mission regardless of its outcome. And both films use the spy’s undercover relationship as a device for examining something larger about the relationship between personal identity and national identity, about what we are willing to sacrifice and to whom.

What the comparison ultimately reveals is that Bollywood has developed two distinct schools of spy cinema that are in genuine tension with each other. The dominant school, represented by the YRF franchise and its commercial successors, treats espionage as nationalist mythology. The agent is an avatar of national power and national virtue, and the films are civic rituals as much as entertainment. The emergent school, represented by Raazi and, more ambitiously, by Dhurandhar, treats espionage as psychological tragedy. The agent is a human being consumed by an institutional process, and the films are moral investigations as much as entertainments.

These schools are not simply distinguishable by tone or by political position. They are distinguishable by what they believe the audience is for. The mythology school believes the audience wants confirmation and celebration: confirmation that India’s intelligence services are exceptional, celebration of the nation’s capacity to protect itself. The tragedy school believes the audience can be asked to do more: to hold contradiction, to feel cost, to remain with a character through the duration it takes to understand what the mission actually required of him. Dhurandhar’s impact on the industry lies precisely in having demonstrated that the tragedy school can produce films with blockbuster commercial trajectories. The franchise proved that the Hindi-speaking audience will spend six hours with a character who is never straightforwardly heroic, who suffers credibly, who operates in moral ambiguity, and who does not offer the simple satisfactions of the mythology school. That is a claim that would have been rejected by most industry observers before the franchise’s release, and the numbers make the rejection obsolete.

The comparison also reveals something about the creative ecology in which these films are produced. The YRF Spy Universe and Dhurandhar did not emerge from competing creative traditions operating in isolation. They are products of the same industry, drawing on many of the same crew members, operating in the same commercial ecosystem, and competing for the same audience’s attention and money. Aditya Dhar’s career began under the shadow of the commercial blockbuster template that YRF exemplifies; Uri succeeded precisely because it combined procedural seriousness with the nationalist energy that the mainstream audience responds to. Dhurandhar is the film he was able to make because Uri established that a different register was commercially viable. The two schools of Bollywood spy cinema are not antagonists. They are, in a meaningful sense, collaborators in an ongoing negotiation about what the genre is for and what the audience deserves.

What the comparison also reveals, perhaps most usefully, is the gap between what the franchise delivers as commercial entertainment and what it delivers as cinema. The box office performance of both Dhurandhar films is a fact about audience appetite. The critical conversation around what those films argue and how they argue it is a fact about the franchise’s ambition. These two facts are unusually aligned in the case of Dhurandhar: a franchise with serious artistic ambition found a massive commercial audience. This alignment is rare enough in Hindi cinema that it warrants sustained attention. The question is whether the industry will learn the right lessons from it: not simply to make longer spy films with grittier action, but to trust that Indian audiences can handle, and actively want, cinema that treats them as people capable of moral complexity rather than as consumers of national mythology.

What Dhurandhar has done for its genre is not to replace the YRF school or make the mythology school obsolete. The mythology school will continue to produce successful films, because the appetite it serves is real and large. What Dhurandhar has done is to expand the genre’s range by proving that a different mode of spy cinema, one closer in spirit to le Carre than to Ian Fleming, can coexist in the same market with superhero-adjacent espionage entertainment and reach its own enormous audience. The Bollywood spy thriller is now officially large enough to contain both approaches simultaneously, and the Ranveer Singh career analysis demonstrates that the star system, which had previously been organized almost entirely around the mythology school’s requirements, is also large enough to accommodate a leading man who chooses depth over charisma. That is a development worth the sustained analysis this comparison has required.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Dhurandhar better than Pathaan?

Comparing Dhurandhar and Pathaan as if they are competing for the same prize misses what makes both films interesting on their own terms. Pathaan is a spectacle film built around the return of a superstar, and it delivers exactly what it promises with considerable craft. Dhurandhar is a psychological study built around the cost of a decade-long undercover operation, and it delivers something the spy genre had never attempted in Hindi cinema before. “Better” depends entirely on what you are looking for from a spy film. If you want kinetic pleasure, charisma, and the satisfaction of watching a hero triumph against impossible odds, Pathaan is the more efficient delivery system. If you want a film that stays with you for days because its moral questions resist easy resolution, Dhurandhar is in a different category. They are both major accomplishments in different registers.

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Raazi as a spy film?

Raazi is Dhurandhar’s closest Indian-cinema relative, and the comparison is the most instructive in the genre. Both send an Indian undercover agent into Pakistani society, both agents build genuine emotional bonds that the mission requires them to destroy, and both films are more interested in the human cost of espionage than in its spectacle. The differences are substantial: Raazi is a two-hour film built around a female protagonist, while Dhurandhar is a six-hour franchise built around a male protagonist with a decade of undercover work as its canvas. Gender changes the texture of the undercover experience significantly: Sehmat’s cover requires performing a specific and constrained version of femininity, while Hamza’s cover requires performing an entirely different cultural and religious identity over a much longer duration. Raazi achieves its emotional impact with more economy. Dhurandhar achieves something larger but with more unevenness.

Q: Is Dhurandhar inspired by Baby?

Baby is a real precursor to Dhurandhar in the sense that Neeraj Pandey’s film established that Bollywood audiences would accept a spy thriller stripped of romance and glamour, built around procedural realism and operational seriousness. Aditya Dhar has referenced Baby among the films he admires. The tonal influence is real: both films treat counter-terrorism as a professional undertaking rather than a heroic adventure, both take the strategic dimension of the mission seriously, and both resist the temptation to make the operative into a superhero. But Dhurandhar departs from Baby in almost every structural way. Baby operates in compressed timescales. Dhurandhar operates across a decade. Baby’s hero is never in genuine psychological danger from the mission itself. Dhurandhar’s premise is that the psychological danger is the mission’s central cost. The inspiration is there, but Dhurandhar has outgrown it.

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to the YRF Spy Universe in terms of action quality?

The action in Dhurandhar and the action in the YRF Spy Universe are built for different purposes and evaluated fairly only against their own intentions. The YRF franchise, from War through Pathaan to War 2, produces action sequences that are among the most technically polished and choreographically ambitious in Bollywood history. The stunt work is spectacular, the production values are immense, and the sequences are designed to produce unambiguous pleasure in the viewer. Dhurandhar’s action sequences are not designed to produce pleasure in the same way. They are designed to feel consequential: ugly, painful, and weighted with the narrative significance of what they cost the characters. The warehouse fight in Part 1 is a masterclass in making combat feel like survival rather than performance. Neither approach is objectively superior. They are in service of entirely different theories of what action cinema is for.

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

This is an interesting question about institutional creative appetite. The YRF Spy Universe is a branded franchise with specific audience commitments that have been established across multiple films and stars. The audience that returns for Tiger and Pathaan sequels has certain expectations that the franchise has been very successful at meeting, and departing dramatically from those expectations carries real commercial risk. A YRF film with Dhurandhar’s tonal register would represent a significant departure from the brand’s core proposition. That said, the commercial success of Dhurandhar almost certainly creates internal industry pressure on franchises like YRF to demonstrate that they can operate with similar psychological depth. Whether that pressure produces actual creative change, or whether it produces films that gesture toward depth while maintaining the franchise’s core spectacular mode, is a question the next five years of YRF releases will answer.

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Hollywood spy films like Bourne or James Bond?

The most honest comparison is not to Bond or Bourne but to the films that replaced Bond in the cultural conversation: the le Carre adaptations (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Night Manager), and films like Zero Dark Thirty and Sicario that treat intelligence work as a morally compromised institutional process rather than individual heroism. Dhurandhar is more tonally aligned with these films than with either the Bond franchise or the Bourne series, though it carries a specifically Bollywood emotional register in its treatment of family, sacrifice, and duty that no Hollywood spy film quite matches. The Bourne comparison is tempting because both franchises are built around amnesiac-adjacent identity fracture: a man who no longer knows exactly who he is because the institution that built him has overwritten his original self. But Bourne is fundamentally an action franchise with identity questions as texture, while Dhurandhar is fundamentally an identity film with action sequences as punctuation.

Q: Which Bollywood spy film has the best writing after Dhurandhar?

Among the films discussed in this comparison, Raazi has the most distinguished screenplay in terms of structural sophistication and thematic coherence. Meghna Gulzar and Bhavani Iyer’s adaptation of Harinder Sikka’s novel is a model of narrative economy: every scene advances the moral argument, every character exists in service of the central dilemma, and the film earns its devastating ending through patient preparation. Baby’s screenplay, by Neeraj Pandey, is the genre’s best procedural work: the operational logic is rigorous, the dialogue is credible, and the plotting is tight. The YRF films are competently written within their genre conventions but do not aspire to the kind of thematic architecture that Raazi or Dhurandhar demonstrate. Dhurandhar’s screenplay, written by Aditya Dhar, is the most ambitious in scope but also the most uneven in execution, which is a function of the sheer scale of what it is attempting.

Q: Is Dhurandhar a propaganda film like its critics say?

The propaganda question deserves a more precise answer than either its critics or its defenders typically provide. Dhurandhar is a film that takes the legitimacy of the Indian state’s counter-terrorism operations entirely for granted, frames its antagonists in specifically Pakistani and terrorist contexts, and produces an emotional experience in which the Indian audience is positioned to feel pride and catharsis at the franchise’s climactic events. In these respects, it operates within a nationalist framework that is shared by most mainstream Indian spy cinema. What separates it from pure propaganda is its genuine engagement with cost: the film does not pretend that Operation Dhurandhar was free, that Hamza’s sacrifice was simple, or that the institutional decisions that enabled the operation were made by morally unblemished people. Propaganda simplifies. Dhurandhar complicates. The complications are not enough to fully escape the nationalist framework, but they are substantial enough that dismissing the franchise as mere propaganda misses most of what makes it cinematically serious.

Q: How does Ek Tha Tiger compare to Dhurandhar?

Ek Tha Tiger, directed by Kabir Khan, is the film that established the template that the YRF Spy Universe has been building on ever since. It is a romance dressed as a spy thriller: Tiger falls in love with a Pakistani ISI agent, and the film’s real drama is their relationship rather than the operational mission. The espionage is backdrop. Dhurandhar could not be more different in its fundamental priorities. In Dhurandhar, the relationships that Hamza forms inside his cover are instruments of the mission, and the tragedy is that they become more than instruments. Ek Tha Tiger asks whether love can transcend institutional conflict. Dhurandhar asks whether an individual can survive being used as the state’s instrument without losing the capacity for the kind of love that the YRF film takes for granted. They are answering different questions about the same surface topic.

Q: What does Dhurandhar have in common with Ek Tha Tiger despite their differences?

The most interesting thing they share is the insight that deep-cover work requires the operative to form genuine relationships with the people they are supposed to be deceiving. In Ek Tha Tiger, this insight becomes a romance plot. In Dhurandhar, it becomes a moral tragedy. Both films understand that the spy genre’s most dramatically productive territory is not the action sequence but the relationship compromised by the secret at the center of it. The YRF franchise uses this insight to generate emotion within a romance frame. Dhurandhar uses it to generate emotion within a sacrifice frame. The insight is the same. The genre commitments attached to it are entirely different.

Q: Is Baby (2015) more realistic than Dhurandhar?

Baby is more procedurally specific than Dhurandhar in some respects: Neeraj Pandey’s film depicts intelligence tradecraft with a documentary-adjacent attention to operational detail that Dhurandhar, which is more interested in psychological texture than procedure, does not always match. But realism is not a single axis. Dhurandhar is more realistic about the psychological experience of deep-cover work than any other Indian spy film, including Baby. The operational specificity of Baby is its form of realism. The psychological specificity of Dhurandhar is its form of realism. Neither film is comprehensively realistic, because both are dramatic narratives with the story-telling compressions and amplifications that drama requires. What both films share, and what separates them from the YRF films, is a commitment to making the audience believe that the events they are watching could have happened to real people in the real world.

Q: Which Bollywood spy film has the best villain after Dhurandhar?

Rehman Dakait in Dhurandhar, as realized by Eijaz Khan, is the most fully drawn antagonist in the genre’s history within Hindi cinema. The YRF films produce spectacular antagonists, particularly War’s villain dynamic, but they are conceived primarily as obstacles for the hero rather than as characters with independent psychological life. Raazi’s Pakistani characters are rendered with more sympathy than most Indian spy films attempt, but they are not the focus of the narrative. Rehman in Dhurandhar is genuinely complex: a crime lord with a code, a father with a domestic life, a power center in a world the film renders with enough detail that his position within it feels earned rather than theatrical. The film is interested in what makes Rehman who he is, and that interest produces a villain whose relationship to Hamza is one of the franchise’s richest dramatic engines. Baby’s villain, by contrast, is primarily a plot function: a terrorist to be neutralized rather than a person to be understood.

Q: Will there be a Bollywood spy film that combines the YRF style with Dhurandhar’s psychological depth?

This is the question the industry is currently trying to answer. The commercial success of Dhurandhar has demonstrated that psychological depth does not prevent a spy film from finding a massive audience, and that knowledge will influence how studios and filmmakers approach future projects in the genre. But combining YRF’s spectacular action with Dhurandhar’s psychological architecture is genuinely difficult, not because the two approaches are aesthetically incompatible but because they serve different audience relationships. The YRF model offers immediate, unambiguous pleasures. Dhurandhar requires patience, tolerance for ambiguity, and a willingness to sit with unresolved moral questions. Films that try to offer both sometimes end up offering neither fully. The more productive development is probably not hybrid films but a mature industry that can sustain both modes simultaneously, which is more or less what Bollywood has arrived at in the post-Dhurandhar landscape.

Q: What is the best entry point for someone new to Bollywood spy films?

The answer depends on what kind of cinema the new viewer is comfortable with. For someone who prefers spectacular entertainment with charismatic stars and genuinely impressive action, Pathaan is the most satisfying entry point: it is the YRF model at its commercial peak, the movie that announced the post-pandemic return of big-screen Bollywood with maximum confidence. For someone who wants to understand what Indian spy cinema can do at its most psychologically ambitious, Raazi is the ideal starting point: it is the most accessible of the serious spy films, built around a central performance by Alia Bhatt that is irresistible across a compact two-hour runtime. For someone who wants both the scale of the YRF model and the psychological weight of the Raazi school, Dhurandhar Part 1 is the right choice, with the understanding that it is the first half of a six-hour argument that does not fully resolve until the franchise’s second film.

Q: How has Dhurandhar influenced the films announced after it?

The industry announcements in the immediate post-Dhurandhar period reflect a clear shift in ambition among the studios planning spy content. Projects that might previously have been pitched as straightforward action entertainments are now being described in terms that emphasize psychological complexity, long-term undercover operations, and moral ambiguity. Whether these descriptions translate into actual creative ambition in the finished films remains to be seen, but the language in which spy thrillers are being marketed and developed has changed. Dhurandhar has created a new vocabulary for Indian spy cinema, and the vocabulary, at minimum, signals what kind of films the industry believes audiences now expect the genre to be capable of producing.

Q: How does the cultural impact of Dhurandhar compare to Uri: The Surgical Strike?

Uri changed Bollywood’s relationship to military and intelligence content by demonstrating that a film built around a real operation, presented with procedural specificity and political conviction, could find a massive audience outside the festival circuit and outside the star-vehicle system. Uri ran on earned credibility rather than star power, and its success opened a commercial lane for films that treated national security seriously as subject matter. Dhurandhar built on this lane but occupied it very differently. Uri’s emotional architecture is celebratory: the operation succeeds, the nation is avenged, how’s the josh. Dhurandhar’s emotional architecture is elegiac: the operation succeeds, but the cost is so high that success and tragedy are almost indistinguishable. Aditya Dhar made both films, which makes the Uri-to-Dhurandhar progression one of the most interesting creative evolutions in recent Bollywood directing careers. Uri shows you what the operation looked like. Dhurandhar shows you what it cost.

Q: Does Dhurandhar work as a standalone film or is the comparison to other spy films necessary to appreciate it?

Dhurandhar works completely as a standalone franchise; understanding its genre context enriches the experience but is not required for it. The films are powerful on their own terms for viewers who have never seen a Bollywood spy film in their lives, because the human story at the center, a man disappearing into a role he created and being unable to find his way back to himself, is universal in its emotional architecture. The genre comparison matters for a different reason: it clarifies what Dhurandhar is arguing against. The franchise is, in part, a riposte to the model of espionage that Bollywood had been selling for fifteen years. Knowing that model makes the riposte more legible. But the argument Dhurandhar is making about identity, loyalty, and the institutional cost of covert work is legible and moving whether or not the viewer has ever seen a Tiger film or a Pathaan.

Q: What makes Dhurandhar’s dialogue different from the YRF spy films?

The YRF spy films, particularly the Tiger franchise, have developed a distinctive mode of dialogue that functions as brand communication: lines designed to become cultural catchphrases, to circulate on social media, to function outside the film as tokens of the franchise’s identity. This is a legitimate and effective form of dialogue writing for the mythology school of spy cinema. Dhurandhar’s dialogue philosophy is the opposite: the franchise’s most powerful moments are built on what is not said, on the gap between what Hamza says and what Jaskirat thinks, on the loaded silences of people who know things they cannot acknowledge. The dialogue in Dhurandhar resists the aphoristic compression of the YRF style because Aditya Dhar understands that the psychological experience he is dramatizing is not reducible to quotable lines. The characters in Dhurandhar sound like people trying not to say what they mean, which is both truer to the undercover experience and harder to reduce to a WhatsApp forward.

Q: What does Dhurandhar tell us about where Indian spy cinema is heading?

The genre’s future is probably not a single direction but a widening field. The commercial success of both the YRF model and the Dhurandhar model, with very different films finding very large audiences in the same marketplace, suggests that Indian spy cinema has matured enough to sustain genuine diversity of approach. The mythology school will continue to produce spectacular entertainments built around major stars and branded franchise continuity. The tragedy school, emboldened by what Dhurandhar proved is commercially possible, will produce films that take the human cost of intelligence work seriously and ask audiences to do more work than the mythology school requires. The most interesting territory will probably be the films that learn from both models without being constrained by either: films that bring Dhurandhar’s psychological seriousness to action sequences engineered with YRF’s production craftsmanship, or that bring the mythology school’s momentum and energy to stories with Raazi’s moral weight. Whether Bollywood can produce that synthesis consistently, and not just in isolated masterworks, is the question that the next decade of the genre’s history will answer.

Q: How does the treatment of RAW as an institution differ across these spy films?

RAW as a dramatic subject is handled very differently across the Bollywood spy filmography, and the differences are revealing. In the YRF Spy Universe, RAW is essentially infallible: the institution is always the authority, always the moral center, and the operative’s relationship to it is one of loyal service within a system that works. Baby portrays RAW (or its fictional equivalent) with somewhat more procedural specificity but equally unquestioned moral authority: the institution asks for difficult things and the operatives deliver them, and the audience is not invited to evaluate the institution’s decisions critically. Dhurandhar takes a different position. The RAW handlers in the franchise, particularly Ajay Sanyal, are portrayed as sincere and competent people making difficult decisions within real constraints, but the franchise does not treat their decisions as automatically correct. The scene in Part 1 where Sanyal evaluates what the operation is costing Hamza against what it is delivering strategically is one of the franchise’s most honest moments precisely because it shows an intelligence official thinking like an administrator of risk rather than a moral authority. Dhurandhar is the first major Bollywood spy film to treat RAW as an institution that can be both indispensable and imperfect simultaneously.

Q: How important is music to differentiating the Dhurandhar experience from the YRF spy films?

The sonic architecture of the Bollywood spy film is an underexamined dimension of how these franchises position their audiences emotionally. The YRF spy films use music in the conventional Bollywood mode, with integrated songs functioning as emotional punctuation and background score amplifying the action’s kinetic energy. The music in Pathaan and the Tiger franchise is unambiguously pleasurable: it is designed to generate excitement, to signal emotional registers, and to function as entertainment independent of the film it accompanies. Shashwat Sachdev’s score for Dhurandhar operates differently: it functions as the franchise’s emotional narrator in a way that is closer to a leitmotif-based film score in the European tradition than to the Bollywood convention. Where the YRF score tells the audience what to feel by announcing it emphatically, the Dhurandhar score tracks Hamza’s internal life in a way the character himself cannot express in dialogue. The music knows what Hamza cannot say. This is a more sophisticated use of film scoring than the genre had previously demonstrated, and it is one of the reasons the franchise’s emotional impact outlasts the viewing experience in a way that the YRF films, for all their immediate pleasure, typically do not.

Q: Has any critic successfully argued that the YRF spy universe is actually more sophisticated than it appears?

The most interesting counter-argument to the analysis this article presents is not that Dhurandhar is overrated but that the YRF Spy Universe is systematically underrated. The case for the defense runs roughly as follows: the YRF films operate within a mythology framework, yes, but mythology has never been a less serious form of cultural expression than realism. The Marvel films that the YRF franchise is compared to are taken seriously as cultural artifacts by a significant body of scholarly and critical attention, not because they are realistic but because they are coherent expressions of a cultural moment. The YRF franchise’s engagement with masculinity, with the relationship between the individual body and the national body, with the aesthetics of physical competence as a form of national confidence, is substantive cultural work that a purely plot-and-character analysis will miss. This argument has real merit. The mythology school of spy cinema is doing something, and what it is doing is worth taking seriously on its own terms. The article’s comparative judgment stands, but the counter-argument is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.

Q: What would it take for the YRF Spy Universe to make a film as psychologically serious as Dhurandhar?

The franchise would need to do several things simultaneously that its current structure makes very difficult. It would need to accept that its stars, who are the primary brand assets of the franchise, can be portrayed as vulnerable in ways that challenge rather than reconfirm the brand’s core proposition. It would need to commit to a runtime and a narrative pace that the marketplace has historically punished YRF films for approaching. It would need to find a story that justifies the kind of tonal consistency that psychological depth requires, rather than the tonal variation that keeps a Pathaan or a Tiger entertaining across its runtime. None of these changes are impossible, but all of them require the franchise to accept short-term commercial risk for long-term creative credibility. The post-Dhurandhar landscape makes that risk more defensible than it would have been before the franchise demonstrated its commercial viability. Whether YRF leadership sees the risk as worth taking is a business decision that the critical argument cannot resolve, but Dhurandhar has at least made the business case for the risk.

Q: How does the franchise guide compare both films for a first-time viewer trying to plan how to approach the series?

For a first-time viewer approaching the franchise, the complete guide to watching both films is the essential orientation resource, particularly for understanding how the narrative threads of the complete Dhurandhar universe connect across both installments. The comparison this article makes is most valuable after the viewing experience rather than before: knowing how Dhurandhar positions itself against the YRF model enriches the second viewing of Part 1, when the franchise’s specific choices about heroism and violence and duration begin to feel like deliberate arguments rather than stylistic preferences. The first viewing should ideally be unmediated by genre expectation. Let the films make their own case. Come to the comparison afterward, when you have the material to evaluate what the franchise is actually doing rather than relying on what you expected it to do.