There is a moment near the middle of the first picture when Hamza Ali Mazari, cornered in a narrow Lyari stairwell with three of Rehman Dakait’s men closing from below, does something that no Bollywood hero is supposed to do. He hesitates. The hesitation lasts perhaps a second and a half, long enough for the audience to register that the man on screen is calculating not how to win but how to survive while protecting a lie that has taken him years to build. When he finally moves, the brutality that follows is shocking precisely because the pause preceded it. That single beat tells you everything about how Aditya Dhar stages brutality. The fighting in this duology is never decoration. It is a window into a mind that can never stop performing, and the best of these set-pieces are the ones where the performance nearly cracks.

This is the argument of the entire piece, stated plainly so you know what you are reading: the combat in Dhurandhar earns its place in the front rank of modern Indian cinema not because it is the loudest or the bloodiest, though it is frequently both, but because every blow, every reload, every sprint through a flooded alley advances the story and exposes the people inside it. The duology treats physical conflict as a diagnostic tool. You learn who someone is by watching how they hurt others and how they absorb being hurt. A ranking that measures these set-pieces by explosion size would miss the point entirely. The ranking that follows measures them by how much they reveal.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand what Dhar refused to do. He had every incentive to build a spectacle machine. The budget was there, the star was willing, and the marketplace rewards bombast. Instead he built a duology where the most frightening thing on screen is often a quiet man deciding whether to kill. The fights have consequences that ripple forward into the plot. People die who matter. Bodies stay broken. The hero limps in the next scene. This insistence on aftermath, on the long tail of injury, separates the duology from the weightless choreography that dominates the genre. If you want to see how completely Dhar rewires the grammar of the form, you can read our breakdown of his evolution as a filmmaker across his whole body of work, because the combat here is the purest distillation of his obsessions.

The Criteria: How These Set-Pieces Earn Their Rank

Any honest ranking has to declare its yardstick before it starts measuring, otherwise the order is just taste dressed up as authority. Five questions govern every judgment in this piece, and they are weighted heavily toward meaning over scale.

The first question is narrative integration. Does the confrontation move the plot, or could you cut it without losing anything? A great deal of Bollywood fighting is detachable, a music-video interlude that pauses the story so the star can look magnificent. The strongest beats in Dhurandhar cannot be removed without the surrounding story collapsing. When Hamza guts his way out of the fish-market ambush, the consequence is that Rehman begins to trust him, and that trust is the engine of the next ninety minutes. Remove the brawl and the trust has no foundation. That is integration.

The second question is character revelation. Do we learn something true about a person by watching them under physical threat? The duology is unusually rich here because its protagonist is a man with two selves, and combat is where the seam between them shows. Jaskirat the wounded patriot and Hamza the cold operator fight differently, and the most thrilling beats are the ones where you can see which self is driving. We have written an entire study of the psychological split that defines this character, and the fights are where that split becomes visible flesh.

The third question is craft. Choreography, camera, cutting, sound. This is the technical layer, and it is where the duology is most consistently excellent. Dhar favors the readable long take over the incoherent flurry of micro-cuts, and his collaborators light and frame the brutality so you always know where bodies are in space. The geography is never confused. You feel the room.

The fourth question is emotional impact. Does the beat make you feel something beyond adrenaline? Fear, grief, disgust, exhilaration, dread. The cheapest set-pieces produce only the last of these, and only briefly. The richest produce a knot in the stomach that outlasts the running time.

The fifth question is originality within the landscape. Does the beat do something the genre has not already exhausted? Bollywood has staged ten thousand shootouts. The ones that earn a high rank here find a fresh angle, whether through restraint, through staging, or through the psychological pressure layered underneath the physical event.

With those five blades sharpened, we can begin to cut.

Action as Character Revelation

Start with the dimension that matters most, because it is the one the duology understands more deeply than any of its peers. In these films, you do not learn who people are by listening to what they say. Everyone lies. Hamza lies professionally, Rehman lies to project strength, Major Iqbal lies as a reflex of his trade, and even Chaudhary Aslam, the closest thing the story has to a straight shooter, conceals more than he reveals. The only place the truth leaks out is in the body under pressure. That is why the combat carries so much weight. It is the duology’s lie detector.

Consider the stairwell beat described at the opening. Watch Ranveer Singh’s eyes in the second before he commits. There is a flicker of the man underneath, Jaskirat, the boy whose family was taken from him, and that flicker contains grief, not rage. When he strikes, he strikes like a man punishing the world for a wound it gave him long ago. The choreography reinforces this. He does not fight cleanly. He fights like someone who learned to hurt people out of necessity and has never made peace with the skill. His elbows land slightly too hard. He keeps striking after the threat is neutralized, one beat too long, and then catches himself, and the self-disgust crosses his face before the next opponent arrives. None of this is in the dialogue. All of it is in the staging. This is the duology telling you who Hamza is without a single line.

Compare that to the way Rehman Dakait moves through a brawl. Arjun Rampal plays the crime lord as a man who has never once doubted his right to take a life, and his physicality broadcasts that certainty. He does not hesitate. He does not flinch. When he kills, he does so with the bored efficiency of a man stamping a document. The contrast with Hamza is the whole tragedy of their relationship compressed into movement. Hamza fights like a man at war with himself. Rehman fights like a man who has never met his own conscience. In the late confrontation between them, the duology pays this contrast off in a way that is genuinely devastating, because by then we understand that Hamza has spent years studying this man and has absorbed some of his coldness, and the fight becomes a referendum on how much of himself the agent has lost. You can trace the full architecture of that relationship in our deep analysis of the first installment, where the seeds of the final reckoning are planted in their earliest scenes together.

Then there is Major Iqbal, the ISI officer played with reptilian intelligence by Akshaye Khanna, who almost never fights with his hands at all. His brutality is delegated, ordered from a distance, signed off in offices. The one time the duology puts him in physical danger, the beat is staged to emphasize how unnatural the situation is for him, how the man’s entire power rests on never having to dirty his own hands. When that buffer is stripped away and Iqbal must defend himself directly, Khanna plays it as a kind of existential affront, a king forced to pick up a sword. The choreography deliberately makes him look competent but uncomfortable, skilled but unpracticed, and that single beat reveals more about the character’s psychology than pages of exposition could. Power that has never been physically tested is brittle, and the duology shows you that brittleness in the way the man holds a weapon.

This is the through-line that elevates the duology above its competition. Every major physical confrontation is also a character study. The duology never wastes a punch on a nobody. Even the anonymous henchmen are choreographed to reveal something about the world they inhabit, the desperation of men with no options fighting for crime bosses who would not mourn them. When you watch a Lyari foot soldier die badly in a doorway, the staging insists you register him as a person, not a target. That insistence is the moral spine of the whole approach, and it connects directly to the duology’s larger argument about the human cost of the games these institutions play.

The Choreography of Consequence

Now turn to craft, and specifically to the idea that organizes all of Dhar’s technical choices: consequence. In most commercial Hindi cinema, the hero takes a beating and walks it off. Ribs that should be shattered heal between cuts. Faces that absorb a dozen blows show a photogenic trickle of blood and nothing more. The body is a brand asset to be protected. Dhar rejects this completely. In his duology, damage accumulates and stays. Hamza enters the back half of the first picture carrying injuries from the front half. He favors a leg. He cannot fully close one hand. The performance and the choreography conspire to keep the cost visible, and that visibility transforms how we watch every subsequent confrontation, because we know the man cannot simply absorb infinite punishment.

This philosophy shows up most clearly in how the duology stages hand-to-hand combat versus how it stages gunplay. The fistfights are slow, grinding, exhausting affairs. Dhar lets them run long, lets the combatants tire, lets the rhythm sag the way a real fight sags when two men have been grappling for ninety seconds and both are gasping. There is a brawl in a Lyari bathhouse, all steam and wet tile and slipping feet, that may be the most physically convincing piece of close combat in recent Indian cinema. The two men cannot find their footing. They grab at each other not with balletic precision but with the clumsy desperation of people genuinely trying not to die. The camera stays close, the cutting stays patient, and the sound design foregrounds the wet impacts and the ragged breathing. By the end, both men are spent, and the victory feels less like triumph than like exhausted survival. That is the choreography of consequence in its purest form.

The gunplay operates on a different but related principle. Where the fistfights stretch time, the firefights compress it. Dhar understands that real gun brutality is fast, chaotic, and over before anyone fully processes it, and he stages his shootouts to honor that truth. There is no slow-motion ballet of spinning shell casings. When the bullets start, people fall quickly, often anonymously, and the survivors are left in ringing silence trying to understand what just happened. The harbor firefight in the first picture lasts barely ninety seconds of screen time, but it kills three named characters and reshapes the entire power structure of the Karachi underworld. Dhar refuses to milk it. The brevity is the point. Violence this lethal does not get a victory lap.

Compare this approach to the dominant modes in Indian genre and you see how radical it is. The polished YRF spy spectacle, all gleaming surfaces and gravity-optional stunts, treats combat as aspiration, a fantasy of invulnerable cool. South Indian mass cinema, at its most operatic, treats combat as myth, the hero as demigod bending physics to his will. Both are legitimate traditions with their own pleasures, and Dhar is not interested in either. His combat is grounded in weight, friction, and pain. His hero is not a demigod and not a brand. He is a man who bleeds, tires, and breaks, and who keeps going anyway, and the gap between those two ideas, the breaking and the continuing, is where the duology finds its grip on the audience. For a fuller comparison of how Dhurandhar repudiates the prevailing spy-movie template, our examination of the duology against its Bollywood predecessors maps the entire genealogy of influence and rejection.

The technical execution deserves its own appreciation. The long take is Dhar’s signature weapon, and he deploys it with discipline rather than showmanship. A lesser director uses the unbroken shot to announce his own virtuosity. Dhar uses it to trap the viewer inside the duration of an event, to deny the relief that a cut would provide. When the camera follows Hamza through a running gun battle across three rooftops without cutting away, the effect is not awe at the technical feat, though the feat is real. The effect is dread, because you cannot escape the continuity of the danger any more than the character can. The duology’s visual language is built to maximize immersion in the physical reality of conflict, and we have devoted a full study to how the cinematography constructs this immersive grammar, because the camera work is inseparable from why the combat lands.

The Body That Bleeds: Brutality as Moral Argument

The duology carries an adult certification, and it earns it. There is a wet, unflinching quality to the worst of the brutality that has made some viewers uncomfortable and prompted the predictable accusation that the films wallow in cruelty for its own sake. This charge deserves a serious answer rather than a defensive dismissal, because the question of whether brutality is purposeful or gratuitous is the most important critical question the duology raises.

Here is the case for purpose. Hamza’s mission requires him to do terrible things to maintain a lie that serves a larger national objective. The duology is fundamentally a meditation on the price of that arrangement, on what a state asks of the human beings it sends into the dark. If the brutality were sanitized, if killing looked clean and consequence-free, the central moral inquiry would evaporate. The audience must feel the weight of what Hamza does, must flinch at the things his cover demands, because the whole emotional architecture depends on us understanding that these acts cost him something irreplaceable. A movie that argues espionage hollows out the soul cannot then stage killing as bloodless fun. The brutality is the argument made flesh.

Consider the interrogation that comes roughly two-thirds through the first installment. Hamza, to preserve his standing with Rehman, must extract information from a man he privately suspects is innocent of betrayal. The scene is hard to watch, and it is meant to be. Dhar stages it without music, in a flat institutional light, holding on faces longer than comfort allows. The horror is not in graphic gore, of which there is relatively little, but in the protagonist’s face as he does the work. Ranveer Singh plays it as a man performing competence while something inside him dies, and the dissonance between the steady hands and the dead eyes is the entire point. When the scene ends, the duology refuses to let Hamza off the hook. The information he extracts turns out to be worthless. The man he broke knew nothing. That choice, the pointlessness of the cruelty, is the duology telling you in the bluntest possible terms that brutality in this world is rarely clean and almost never redemptive.

This is where the duology separates itself from the genre cinema that uses brutality as a flavor enhancer. In a lesser movie, the interrogation would yield a crucial clue, and the cruelty would be retroactively justified by results. Dhar denies that comfort. His brutality frequently accomplishes nothing or accomplishes the wrong thing, and that refusal to reward brutality with narrative payoff is precisely what makes it moral, not exploitative. The films are not telling you that hurting people is exciting. They are telling you that hurting people is what this work requires and that the requirement is itself a kind of damnation.

The contrast with the duology’s quieter moments sharpens the effect. The duology knows when to look away, knows the power of the implied over the shown. A child’s death early in the second film is staged almost entirely through sound and the reactions of witnesses, and it lands harder than any explicit image could. This calibration, the willingness to be graphic when graphic serves the argument and restrained when restraint serves it better, is the mark of a filmmaker thinking about brutality, not simply deploying it. The brutality is curated, not sprayed.

There is also a political dimension to the bloodshed that the saga handles with more nuance than its critics allow. The brutality committed by the Karachi underworld, the brutality committed by the agencies that fund and fight that underworld, and the brutality Hamza himself perpetrates are all staged with the same unflinching gaze. The films do not grant the protagonist a hygienic exemption. His kills are as ugly as anyone’s. That refusal to morally launder the hero’s brutality is unusual in a genre built on righteous heroes, and it is one of the reasons the saga reads as serious cinema rather than nationalist cheerleading. The world the films build in Lyari, the ecosystem of competing brutalities, is rendered with a sociological seriousness we explore at length in our study of the Karachi underworld the saga constructs, and the brutality is the texture of that world rather than a separate spectacle bolted onto it.

Sound, Silence, and the Geometry of Lyari

If character revelation is the soul of this combat and consequence is its body, then sound is its nervous system. The duology’s sound design is among the most sophisticated in recent Indian cinema, and it does enormous work in making the physical conflict land. Dhar and his sound team understand a principle that escapes most combat filmmakers: silence is louder than noise. The most terrifying beats in the duology are frequently the quietest, the held breath before the eruption, the ringing deafness after a blast, the moment when the score drops out entirely and you are left alone with the sound of a man’s labored breathing.

The harbor firefight illustrates this beautifully. For the first several seconds the soundscape is dense, layered with shouting, gunfire, and the percussive chaos of bodies hitting concrete. Then, abruptly, after Hamza takes a round that grazes his skull, the mix collapses into a high muffled tone, the cinematic shorthand for concussion, and the audience experiences the rest of the firefight through the protagonist’s damaged hearing. Gunshots become distant thuds. Voices warp. The world goes soft and dangerous. This subjective sound design pulls us inside Hamza’s compromised perception, and the result is one of the most disorienting and immersive stretches in either film. We are not watching the brutality. We are surviving it alongside him.

The saga also uses sound to map space, which matters enormously in a story set in the dense, vertical maze of Lyari. The neighborhood is a character in its own right, a warren of stairwells, rooftops, narrow lanes, and improvised passages, and the combat is choreographed to exploit this geometry. Chases run vertically as often as horizontally, scrambling up fire escapes and across connected roofs. Ambushes emerge from doorways the audience did not know existed. The spatial logic is always coherent, never the disorienting blur of poorly staged combat, and sound is the glue that holds the geography together. You hear pursuers before you see them. You hear a threat approaching from a direction the frame has not yet revealed. This audio-spatial discipline is what makes the chases genuinely tense rather than merely kinetic.

There is a foot chase midway through the first installment that deserves singling out as a masterclass in spatial combat. Hamza, his cover momentarily threatened, must lose a pursuer through the Lyari labyrinth without revealing that he knows he is being followed. The genius of the sequence is that it is a chase the protagonist cannot acknowledge is happening. He must move with apparent casualness while every nerve screams. The choreography becomes a study in controlled panic, the body forced to perform calm while the eyes track every exit. The camera stays with him in long, fluid takes that wind through the neighborhood’s impossible geometry, and the sound design builds dread through the proximity of footsteps the character must pretend not to hear. It is a chase with almost no running, and it is more nail-biting than a dozen conventional pursuits, because the stakes are not speed but the maintenance of a lie.

The musical score, composed by Shashwat Sachdev, functions as the final layer of this nervous system, and its restraint during the physical confrontations is its greatest virtue. Sachdev resists the temptation to score every blow with a percussive sting. Frequently the music withdraws entirely during the worst brutality, leaving only the practical sounds of struggle, and returns only in the aftermath, when the emotional reckoning begins. This counterintuitive choice, scoring the consequence rather than the act, reinforces the duology’s whole approach. The music is not there to make the brutality thrilling. It is there to make us feel what the brutality costs. The full architecture of how the score shapes meaning is something we unpack in our broader examination of the saga, and it rewards a dedicated listen on its own.

The Ranking, Defended Set-Piece by Set-Piece

A ranking is only worth reading if its author commits to an order and defends it. What follows is that commitment. The order runs from the single finest physical confrontation the saga has produced down through the merely excellent, and each placement is argued against the five criteria established earlier. Where a beat ranks lower, the reasons are specific, not dismissive. Even the lowest entry here would be the highlight of most films.

At the very top sits the bathhouse brawl from the first installment, and it is not a close call. This is the beat that fuses every virtue the saga possesses. It advances the plot decisively, since the man Hamza fights is a Dakait lieutenant who has begun to suspect the agent’s true allegiance, and the outcome determines whether the cover survives. It reveals character with brutal clarity, because the fight strips away Hamza’s controlled exterior and forces the wounded, furious man underneath to surface. The craft is impeccable, with patient camera work, coherent geography, and a sound design that turns wet tile and ragged breath into a symphony of exhaustion. The emotional impact is profound, because by the time Hamza holds his opponent under the water you are no longer sure whether you are watching the operative protect his mission or the broken man take revenge on a stranger for crimes a different man committed years ago. And it is wholly original, a piece of close combat unlike anything the genre has staged, grounded in friction and fatigue rather than fantasy. It is the duology’s thesis statement rendered as a fight.

Ranked just beneath it is the interrogation sequence, and some viewers will object that an interrogation is not a combat beat at all. That objection misunderstands the saga. Physical coercion is the most morally loaded form of brutality the duology stages, and this scene is its darkest hour. It ranks this high because no other beat reveals so much about the cost of Hamza’s work, and because Dhar’s refusal to reward the cruelty with useful information is the boldest narrative choice in either film. It loses the top spot only because it is, by design, almost unwatchable, a beat that achieves greatness through discomfort rather than exhilaration. But greatness it is.

Third comes the rooftop chase across the Lyari skyline, the long-take pursuit that traps the viewer in unbroken duration. This is the saga at its most technically dazzling, a single fluid camera move that follows Hamza across three buildings while gunfire chips the parapets around him. It ranks high for craft and immersion, slightly lower for character revelation, since it is more about pure survival than psychological exposure. But the dread it generates, the sense that the danger cannot be escaped because the cut that would relieve us never comes, makes it one of the most viscerally effective stretches in the duology. The technical achievement alone would justify a high placement, and the emotional grip pushes it higher still.

Fourth is the harbor firefight, the brutal ninety-second eruption that reshapes the underworld’s power structure. It ranks here for its ruthless efficiency and its extraordinary subjective sound design, the concussion-warped mix that drops us inside Hamza’s damaged perception. It loses ground only because its very brevity, while thematically deliberate, gives it less room to breathe than the longer set-pieces above it. But pound for pound, second for second, it may be the most densely consequential bloodshed in the saga, killing named characters and rewriting alliances in the time it takes most films to stage a single exchange of dialogue.

Fifth is the controlled foot chase, the pursuit Hamza cannot acknowledge, the masterclass in performed calm. It ranks this high because it is so conceptually original, a chase built on stillness rather than speed, and because it dramatizes the central tension of deep-cover work better than any other physical beat. It ranks below the top four only because its pleasures are cerebral rather than visceral, a slow tightening rather than a sudden grip. But for viewers attuned to its logic, it may be the most quietly brilliant staging choice in either film.

Sixth is the stairwell confrontation that opens this piece, the beat where Hamza hesitates before the bloodshed. It is a smaller-scale encounter than those above it, but the hesitation, that second and a half of visible grief before the brutality, makes it a perfect miniature of the duology’s whole approach. It ranks here rather than higher only because its scale is modest, a quick, contained encounter rather than an extended set-piece. But in terms of pure character revelation per second of screen time, it may be the most efficient beat in the duology.

Seventh, we move into the second installment for the ambush on the bridge, a larger, louder, more conventionally spectacular set-piece that demonstrates both the benefits and the risks of the duology’s expanded budget. The staging is magnificent, the scale genuinely impressive, and the consequence severe. It ranks lower than the first-film beats above it because, for all its scale, it reveals slightly less about character than the more intimate confrontations, trading some psychological depth for spectacle. It is a superb piece of genre filmmaking that nonetheless edges closer to conventional blockbuster grammar than the duology’s best work.

Eighth is the madrasa standoff, a tense, dialogue-laced confrontation that erupts into bloodshed only in its final moments. It ranks here for its almost unbearable tension and its careful escalation, the way the saga lets the threat build through conversation before the eruption. It loses ground only because the eruption itself, when it comes, is briefer and less inventive than the build-up promises, a slight imbalance between anticipation and payoff.

Ninth is the car-bomb sequence, a beat that ranks more for its emotional aftermath than for the explosion itself. The detonation is over in an instant, but the saga lingers on the wreckage, on the survivors, on the slow horror of understanding who was lost. It ranks this low among the major beats because the bloodshed itself is impersonal, a device rather than a confrontation, but the human reckoning that follows elevates it well above mere spectacle.

Tenth and final among the major set-pieces is the climactic raid that closes the second film, and its placement at the bottom of this list requires the most careful defense, because it is in many ways the largest and most ambitious thing the saga attempts. It ranks last not because it is bad, far from it, but because it is where the duology’s commitment to consequence comes under the most strain. The raid is enormous, kinetic, and genuinely thrilling, but its very scale forces some of the grounded realism that defines the duology’s best work to give way to the demands of a blockbuster finale. The bodies fall a little easier here. The hero absorbs a little more than physics should allow. It is a magnificent climax that nonetheless reveals the seam where the duology’s principles meet the marketplace’s expectations, and that revelation, more than any flaw in execution, is why it sits at the foot of this ranking rather than the head.

Evolution from Part 1 to Part 2

A saga that runs across two films invites the obvious question: did the fighting get better or merely bigger? The honest answer is that it got both, and that the two developments are in tension with each other in ways the second film does not fully resolve.

The first installment was made under constraints that turned out to be creatively productive. With a smaller budget and a story rooted in the claustrophobic geography of Lyari, Dhar was forced toward intimacy. The bloodshed had to be human-scaled because the resources for anything else were not there, and that limitation produced the duology’s finest work. The bathhouse brawl, the interrogation, the controlled chase, these are all products of a filmmaking approach that could not afford to be lazy, that had to find tension in faces and footsteps rather than in explosions. Constraint sharpened the duology’s instincts.

The second installment arrived with the expanded resources that commercial success buys, and the fighting grew accordingly. The set-pieces are larger. The bridge ambush and the climactic raid operate at a scale the first film never attempted. The technical polish is higher, the canvas wider, the spectacle more abundant. For viewers who wanted the series to graduate into the big leagues of blockbuster fighting, the second film delivers handsomely. There is genuine craft in the way the larger beats are staged, and the expanded scope allows the story to open out from the alleys of Lyari into a geopolitical theater that the first film could only gesture toward.

But something subtle was traded in the expansion, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The grounded weight that defined the first film’s bloodshed is slightly diluted in the second. When the budget allows for more, the temptation to do more becomes hard to resist, and the second installment occasionally succumbs to the spectacle logic that the first film so pointedly refused. The hero survives encounters in the second film that the first film’s commitment to consequence would have made fatal. The bodies fall a touch more cinematically. The pain, while still present, is occasionally subordinated to the demands of scale.

This is not a fatal flaw, and it would be churlish to overstate it. The second film remains far more grounded than its genre peers, and its best beats still honor the duology’s principles. The madrasa standoff and the car-bomb aftermath are every bit as morally serious as the first film’s work. But the pattern is real, and it tells a familiar story about what happens when an artist who thrived under constraint is handed unlimited resources. The discipline that scarcity enforced becomes a choice that abundance no longer requires, and not every choice goes the saga’s way. The maturation of Dhar’s craft across both films is a subject we examine in depth in our study of his complete directorial evolution, and the fighting is the clearest register of both his growth and his temptations.

The most interesting development between the films is not in the scale of the bloodshed but in its psychology. By the second installment, Hamza has spent so long inside his cover that the seam between Jaskirat and Hamza has nearly closed, and the fighting reflects this. The hesitation that marked his early bloodshed is largely gone. He kills more cleanly now, more efficiently, with less visible self-disgust, and that erosion is itself a kind of tragedy. The man has become the mask. The fighting in the second film is, at its best, a chronicle of this hollowing, and when the series remembers to foreground that psychological cost rather than the physical spectacle, it produces work as fine as anything in the first film.

The Actor’s Body: Ranveer Singh as Physical Instrument

No discussion of this saga’s combat can ignore the physical performance at its center, because the bloodshed works only if the audience believes the man enduring it. Ranveer Singh, an actor previously associated with flamboyant exuberance and maximalist charm, undergoes a transformation here that is as much physical as psychological. He strips away the theatrical bigness that defined his earlier roles and replaces it with a coiled, watchful economy of movement. The body becomes an instrument of concealment. Every gesture is calibrated to give nothing away, and the cost of that calibration shows in the tension he carries in his shoulders, his jaw, the deliberate stillness of his hands.

What makes the performance remarkable is how Singh uses his body differently depending on which self is in control. When Hamza is performing for Rehman and the underworld, his physicality is loose, confident, almost swaggering, the body language of a man who belongs. When the cover slips and Jaskirat surfaces, the body changes. The shoulders draw in. The movements become sharper, more wounded, more grief-driven. This is not in the script. It is a physical performance choice, and it means that an attentive viewer can read which self is fighting purely from how the body moves. In the bathhouse brawl, you can watch the transition happen in real time, the swaggering operative giving way to the furious wounded man as the fight strips away his composure.

The physical conditioning the role demanded was clearly extensive, but the series wisely avoids the trap of fetishizing the transformed physique. There are no gratuitous shots of sculpted muscle, no slow-motion celebrations of the star’s body as object. The conditioning serves the character, not the marketing, and the body we see is functional rather than ornamental, the hard, scarred frame of a man who has been broken and rebuilt by his work. This restraint is rare in a genre that loves to turn its heroes into beefcake, and it keeps the focus where it belongs, on the man inside the body rather than the body itself.

The stunt work deserves equal credit, much of it clearly performed or closely shadowed by the actor, which contributes enormously to the sense of weight and risk. When you believe the star is genuinely in the space, genuinely absorbing the impacts, the bloodshed acquires a credibility that no amount of digital trickery can replicate. The series leans into this reality, favoring practical staging over digital enhancement wherever possible, and the difference is palpable. The bodies on screen feel like bodies, subject to gravity and fatigue and pain, and that physical truth is the foundation on which the saga’s entire approach to bloodshed rests.

How the Action Speaks to the Genre’s Conversation

To rank these set-pieces fairly, you have to situate them within the larger conversation Indian genre cinema has been having with itself, and within the global tradition of the spy thriller. The series did not emerge from nowhere. It is in dialogue with everything from the patriotic war film to the slick spy spectacle to the grounded procedural, and understanding those conversations sharpens our appreciation of what the fighting achieves.

Take the relationship to the modern war film, the territory Dhar himself first explored in his breakout feature. That earlier film staged its carnage with a clean, righteous energy, the controlled aggression of soldiers executing a sanctioned mission. The fighting there had moral clarity. The enemy was external, the cause was just, and the carnage was framed as duty discharged. Dhurandhar represents a profound complication of that earlier approach. Here the carnage is morally murky, the hero’s hands are dirty, and the clean righteousness of the war film gives way to the queasy ambiguity of espionage. The saga’s fighting is, in a sense, an argument with the filmmaker’s own earlier work, a recognition that the real cost of these conflicts cannot be captured by clean heroism. We trace this full dialogue in our side-by-side study of Dhar’s two defining films, and the fighting is where the difference between them is most legible.

The saga’s relationship to the slick spy spectacle is one of pointed rejection. The dominant mode of Hindi spy cinema in recent years has been the invincible-agent fantasy, where the hero performs impossible feats with weightless ease and the fighting exists to thrill rather than to wound. Dhurandhar refuses this premise root and branch. Its agent is not invincible. He is breakable, and he breaks. The staging does not thrill in the conventional sense, or rather it thrills in a different register, the thrill of dread rather than the thrill of triumph. This rejection of the prevailing template is one of the saga’s most important contributions to the genre, and it is the subject of our extended comparison with the Bollywood spy tradition, which maps exactly where Dhurandhar breaks from its peers.

There is also a global lineage to acknowledge. The saga’s commitment to grounded, consequential carnage places it in conversation with the international spy thrillers that abandoned the invulnerable-hero model years ago, the bruising realism of the modern Western espionage film, the moral exhaustion of the great literary spy adaptations. Dhurandhar’s staging belongs to this tradition more than to the local spectacle machine, and recognizing that lineage helps explain why the carnage feels so different from what Indian audiences have been trained to expect. The series is not trying to make you cheer. It is trying to make you understand.

What the series adds to this global conversation is its specific cultural texture, the way the carnage is rooted in the particular geography and sociology of Lyari, the way it carries the weight of real history without being enslaved to it. The staging is not generic spy-thriller carnage transplanted to a South Asian setting. It is savagery that could only happen in this world, shaped by the specific power structures, loyalties, and economies of the place. That specificity is what makes the staging feel lived-in rather than borrowed, and it is the saga’s most distinctive contribution to the form.

Where the Franchise Falls Short

A serious assessment cannot end with praise alone, and the saga’s staging, for all its excellence, has real weaknesses that fan enthusiasm tends to paper over. To rank these set-pieces honestly, we have to be honest about where they stumble.

The most significant problem is the inconsistency between the two films, already discussed but worth restating as a flaw rather than merely an observation. The second installment’s drift toward conventional spectacle is a genuine regression in places, a betrayal of the principles that made the first film’s savagery so distinctive. When the climactic raid lets the hero absorb punishment that the first film’s logic would have made fatal, it is not making a deliberate artistic choice. It is succumbing to commercial pressure, and the seam shows. A series that built its identity on the weight and cost of savagery should not let that weight evaporate when the budget grows, and the fact that it occasionally does is a real failure of nerve.

There is also a problem of repetition that the series does not fully escape. For all the variety in its best beats, the duology returns again and again to the same fundamental scenario, the agent cornered, the cover threatened, the savagery erupting to preserve the lie. This scenario is rich, and the series mines it brilliantly, but by the second film a certain familiarity has set in. The viewer begins to anticipate the rhythm, to know that the tense conversation will erupt into combat, to recognize the shape of the escalation before it arrives. The series’ commitment to its central situation, while admirable, occasionally tips into a predictability that dulls the dread its best work generates.

The treatment of the antagonists’ savagery is another soft spot. While Hamza’s combat is rendered with extraordinary psychological depth, the savagery of the underworld henchmen and the lower-tier antagonists is sometimes more functional, a series of obstacles to be cleared rather than people to be reckoned with. The series’ stated commitment to treating every death as the death of a person is not always honored at the margins, and there are stretches, particularly in the larger set-pieces, where anonymous antagonists fall with the disposability the picture elsewhere refuses. This inconsistency between the moral seriousness of the major confrontations and the relative carelessness of the minor ones is a flaw the picture never fully resolves.

Finally, there is the question of whether the series’ grimness occasionally becomes its own kind of indulgence. A film can fetishize misery as easily as it can fetishize spectacle, and there are moments, particularly in the interrogation and its aftermath, where the relentless bleakness edges toward a punishing quality that serves the filmmaker’s seriousness more than the audience’s understanding. The line between purposeful brutality and self-satisfied grimness is fine, and the picture does not always stay on the right side of it. The best of its savagery earns its darkness. Some of it merely insists on it.

None of these flaws negates the series’ achievement. The staging remains among the finest in contemporary Indian cinema, and its best beats are genuinely great. But greatness that cannot acknowledge its own limits is just fandom, and the picture’s savagery, like all real art, is more interesting for its imperfections than it would be as a flawless monument.

The Bigger Argument: What This Action Reveals

Step back from the individual set-pieces and a larger argument comes into view, one that extends beyond this picture to the state of the genre and the culture that produced it.

The set-pieces in Dhurandhar matters because it represents a wager, largely successful, that audiences trained on weightless spectacle can be retrained to crave consequence. For years the dominant logic of commercial Indian genre held that audiences wanted escape, wanted invulnerable heroes performing impossible feats, wanted force drained of pain so it could function as pure pleasure. Dhurandhar bet against that logic. It bet that audiences would respond to force that hurt, to heroes who broke, to combat that cost something, and the picture’s commercial success suggests the bet paid off. People showed up in enormous numbers to watch a man suffer for his country, and that appetite says something hopeful about the audience that the cynical spectacle machine had underestimated. You can trace the franchise’s full commercial journey through the interactive box office data and see how a film built on grounded, consequential force converted critical respect into mass appeal.

This matters because it expands the space of what mainstream Indian genre can be. Every film that succeeds by refusing the spectacle template makes it a little easier for the next film to take force seriously, to treat the body as breakable, to insist that killing carries a cost. The franchise is not the first to attempt this, but it is among the most commercially successful, and that success is a kind of permission for the filmmakers who follow. The set-pieces in these films is, in this sense, an intervention in the culture of the genre, an argument made not in interviews but in box-office receipts that there is a hungry audience for force that means something.

The deeper argument concerns the relationship between force and identity, which is the franchise’s true subject. Hamza’s tragedy is that the force his work requires slowly remakes him into something he never chose to be. Every act of brutality he commits to preserve his cover erodes the line between the man he is pretending to be and the man he was. The set-pieces is not separate from this theme. It is the theme made physical. When we watch Hamza fight, we are watching identity dissolve in real time, watching a man become his mask through the repeated performance of his mask’s cruelty. This is what elevates the set-pieces from genre exercise to something approaching tragedy, the recognition that what we do to others we ultimately do to ourselves, that the cruelty we perform reshapes the performer.

This argument connects to something universal, the cost that any role exacts on the person who plays it long enough. We have all performed versions of ourselves until the performance became indistinguishable from the truth. The franchise simply dramatizes this universal experience at its most extreme, in a context where the role is a lie that costs lives and the performance is a matter of life and death. The set-pieces is the most visceral expression of this idea, the place where the cost becomes literal blood, and that is finally why these set-pieces matter. They are not about cruelty. They are about what cruelty does to the person who must commit it, and that, more than any explosion, is what the franchise wants you to feel. To understand how this theme threads through every element of the franchise, our comprehensive analysis of the first film lays out the full architecture, and the set-pieces is the load-bearing wall of the whole structure. For those who want to see how the numbers behind this phenomenon stack up against the broader industry, you can compare the franchise against other recent Indian blockbusters in the interactive explorer and watch the data tell the same story the killing does.

The Editing Logic: Cutting for Comprehension

If the camera is how Dhar captures killing, editing is how he makes it legible, and the cutting rhythm of this franchise is one of its quietest triumphs. The prevailing fashion in commercial spectacle editing is the rapid assault, dozens of cuts per confrontation, each shot held for a fraction of a second, the whole assembled into a blur that conveys energy at the expense of clarity. The viewer feels chaos but cannot follow it, registers motion but not meaning. Dhar rejects this fashion as thoroughly as he rejects weightless choreography.

His editing favors comprehension. Shots are held long enough for the eye to read what is happening, for the spatial relationships between combatants to register, for the viewer to track who is where and what just changed. When the cutting does accelerate, it accelerates for a reason, to convey a specific spike in chaos or disorientation, and then it slows again so the consequence can land. This disciplined rhythm is why the franchise’s killing feels coherent where so much genre choreography feels incoherent. You always know what is at stake in the frame because the cutting respects your need to understand it.

The harbor firefight again provides the clearest illustration. Despite its brevity and chaos, the sequence is edited so that every significant beat reads clearly. You know who falls and why. You track the shifting positions of the survivors. The concussion that warps the sound is mirrored in a subtle shift in the cutting rhythm, a slight smearing of the edit that mimics the protagonist’s disorientation without sacrificing comprehension. This is editing as storytelling, the cut serving the narrative rather than disguising the absence of one.

The franchise also understands the power of the withheld cut, the refusal to relieve tension by moving the camera away. In the interrogation, the editing holds far longer than comfort allows, denying the viewer the escape that a cut to a reaction shot or a different angle would provide. The discomfort is partly a function of duration, of being trapped in the unbroken observation of something we want to look away from. This manipulation of cutting rhythm to control emotional response is sophisticated craft, and it is everywhere in the franchise’s best work, the cut withheld to build dread, the cut deployed to deliver shock, the rhythm always serving the meaning, not the spectacle.

There is a counterpoint worth noting. In the second installment’s larger set-pieces, the editing occasionally loosens its discipline, accelerating toward the conventional combat rhythm that the first film so pointedly avoided. The climactic raid, in particular, contains stretches where the cutting speeds up in a manner that prioritizes energy over clarity, and the result is a slight muddying of the spatial logic that the franchise elsewhere maintains so rigorously. It is a minor lapse, but it is consistent with the broader pattern of the second film trading some of its principles for scale, and the editing is one of the registers where that trade is most detectable.

Weapons, Tactics, and the Texture of Authenticity

A franchise that stakes its identity on grounded realism lives or dies by its attention to the texture of how killing actually works, and Dhurandhar is unusually rigorous in this regard. The weaponry, the tactics, the procedural detail of how operatives and criminals actually move and fight, all of it reflects a level of research that most genre films do not bother with, and that authenticity is a significant part of why the choreography feels so credible.

The gunplay is the clearest example. The franchise understands that firearms are not magic wands, that they jam, run dry, and miss, that a firefight is a frantic exercise in cover and reloading rather than a balletic exchange of perfectly aimed shots. The combatants in these films take cover constantly. They run out of ammunition at inconvenient moments. They miss far more often than they hit, and the misses matter, chipping concrete and shattering glass and forcing constant repositioning. This procedural accuracy grounds the killing in a reality that the fantasy gunplay of the spectacle machine never approaches. When Hamza fights with a weapon, you believe he has been trained to use it, and you believe the weapon is a real object with real limitations.

The hand-to-hand combat reflects similar care. The fighting styles are unglamorous and practical, the brutal close-quarters techniques of men trained to incapacitate rather than to perform. There are no spinning kicks, no acrobatic flourishes, no displays of martial-arts virtuosity for its own sake. The combatants fight to end the fight as quickly and decisively as possible, with elbows, knees, headbutts, and improvised weapons, the ugly efficient bloodletting of real close combat. This refusal of choreographic spectacle in favor of brutal practicality is a deliberate choice, and it reinforces the franchise’s whole philosophy. The fighting is not beautiful. It is effective and terrible, and the franchise wants you to feel the difference.

The tradecraft is equally well observed. Hamza’s behavior reflects the actual discipline of deep-cover work, the constant awareness of exits, the management of relationships, the careful calibration of how much bloodletting is necessary versus how much would blow his cover. The controlled foot chase is the purest expression of this, a sequence built entirely around the operational reality that an agent cannot reveal what he knows, but the attention to tradecraft permeates every confrontation. Hamza never fights when he can avoid it, never reveals more capability than his cover allows, always calculates the operational cost of every act of bloodletting. This procedural intelligence elevates the choreography from mere combat to something closer to a chess game played with bodies, and it is one of the franchise’s most distinctive textures.

This commitment to authenticity is not pedantry. It serves the larger argument. A franchise that wants you to feel the cost of bloodletting must first make the slaughter feel real, and realism is built from accumulated detail, from the jam and the reload and the missed shot and the careful management of a cover identity. The texture of authenticity is the foundation on which the franchise’s emotional and moral effects are built, and the care lavished on getting the details right is inseparable from the power of the whole.

Set-Pieces That Almost Made the Ranking

The major ranking covers the ten beats that define the franchise’s choreography, but the duology is rich enough that several strong confrontations fall just outside the main list, and they deserve acknowledgment both for their own merits and for what they reveal about the franchise’s depth.

The market escape early in the first film is a small gem, a brief, tense sequence in which Hamza must extract himself from a crowded bazaar after a deal goes wrong. It does not crack the main ranking because it is more setup than payoff, a sequence that establishes the geography and the stakes more than it delivers a complete dramatic arc. But its handling of crowd, claustrophobia, and the protagonist’s controlled urgency is a fine miniature of the franchise’s approach, and it rewards close attention.

The interrogation’s aftermath, the quiet, devastating sequence in which Hamza processes what he has done, is not a combat beat in the conventional sense and so falls outside the ranking, but it is essential to understanding why the interrogation itself ranks so high. The franchise’s insistence on showing the cost of slaughter rather than just the slaughter is concentrated in these aftermath beats, and the duology is full of them, the quiet reckonings that follow the loud confrontations. They are not conflict, but they are why the conflict matters.

The rooftop standoff in the second film, a tense confrontation that resolves through negotiation rather than slaughter, is a fascinating near-miss. It demonstrates the franchise’s understanding that the threat of aggression can be as powerful as aggression itself, that a confrontation can be thrilling without a single blow being struck. It falls outside the conflict ranking precisely because it resolves without combat, but it is one of the most tense sequences in either film, and its inclusion in this discussion is a reminder that the franchise’s grip on the audience does not depend solely on physical conflict.

The training flashbacks, brief glimpses of Jaskirat’s transformation into Hamza, contain fragments of conflict that illuminate the protagonist’s evolution. These are not full set-pieces, and they are too fragmentary to rank, but they are crucial to understanding how the franchise uses physical capability as a marker of psychological change. The way Jaskirat learns to fight is the way he learns to become someone else, and these training fragments are the franchise showing us the manufacture of a weapon out of a wounded man.

Each of these near-misses reinforces a central point about the franchise. Its conflict is not confined to the showpiece set-pieces. It permeates the whole fabric of the storytelling, in the small escapes, the quiet aftermaths, the tense standoffs, the fragmentary flashbacks. The duology thinks about aggression constantly and from every angle, and that constant attention is why even its minor confrontations carry more weight than the major set-pieces of most of its competitors.

The Collaborators Behind the Combat

A director’s vision for aggression means nothing without the craftspeople who execute it, and the franchise’s conflict is the product of a tightly coordinated team whose contributions deserve recognition. While Dhar provides the philosophy, the realization depends on stunt coordinators, the camera team, the sound designers, and the performers who absorb the physical punishment, and the seamlessness of the result reflects an unusual degree of collaborative coherence.

The stunt coordination is the unglamorous foundation of everything the franchise achieves on screen. The grounded, consequential style the films pursue is far harder to stage than fantasy choreography, because it requires the mayhem to look both brutal and survivable, both chaotic and legible. Achieving that balance demands meticulous planning, the careful design of confrontations that appear spontaneous but are in fact precisely engineered to protect the performers while conveying maximum impact. The bathhouse brawl, with its wet surfaces and grappling intimacy, must have been a logistical nightmare to stage safely, and the fact that it reads as raw and unplanned is a tribute to the invisible labor that went into making it look effortless.

The camera team’s contribution is inseparable from the action’s effect. The long takes that define the franchise’s most immersive sequences require extraordinary coordination between camera movement, performer choreography, and the practical mechanics of the location. A single uninterrupted shot following a fight across three rooftops is not captured by accident. It is the product of exhaustive rehearsal and technical problem-solving, and the apparent ease of the result conceals the difficulty of its creation. The franchise’s visual immersion, examined in detail in our study of its cinematographic approach, is a collaborative achievement of the highest order.

The sound design team, whose work shapes the emotional register of every confrontation, operates at a level rarely matched in Indian cinema. The concussion-warped mix of the harbor firefight, the foregrounded breath and wet impact of the bathhouse brawl, the strategic silences that make the mayhem land, all of it reflects a sophisticated understanding of how sound shapes the experience of physical conflict. The sound is not an afterthought layered on in post-production. It is integral to the conception of each confrontation, designed in concert with the staging to maximize the visceral and emotional impact.

And finally there are the performers, who absorb the physical reality of the violence and convey its cost through their bodies. The franchise’s commitment to practical staging means the actors are genuinely present in the confrontations, genuinely absorbing impacts and conveying exhaustion, and that physical truth is the bedrock of the whole approach. The supporting players, the henchmen and lieutenants and anonymous foot soldiers, contribute as much as the stars, because the franchise’s insistence on treating every death as the death of a person depends on every performer committing fully to the reality of their role. The combat is a collective achievement, and its excellence reflects the coherence of the vision that united everyone who built it.

The Rhythm of Restraint: When the Franchise Withholds

One of the least appreciated aspects of the duology’s approach to physical conflict is how often it chooses not to deliver the eruption the audience expects. A franchise this committed to brutality could easily exhaust the viewer with relentless carnage, and a lesser filmmaker would have done exactly that, mistaking frequency for intensity. Dhar understands the opposite truth, that violence lands hardest when it is rationed, when long stretches of tension precede the eruption, when the threat hangs in the air for minutes before the first blow falls or, sometimes, never falls at all.

The franchise’s pacing of its physical confrontations is therefore a study in delayed gratification. The films make you wait. They build dread through conversation, through the slow tightening of a situation, through the accumulating awareness that something terrible is about to happen, and then they frequently hold that moment far longer than the audience can comfortably bear. The madrasa standoff is the clearest example, a confrontation that simmers through extended dialogue while the threat of violence grows almost unbearable, the tension stretched to the snapping point before the eruption arrives. This patience is the opposite of the spectacle machine’s logic, which delivers its violence early and often to keep the adrenaline flowing. The franchise wants you anxious, not merely entertained, and anxiety requires the discipline of restraint.

There is also the franchise’s willingness to resolve major confrontations without violence at all. The rooftop standoff in the second film, which dissolves through negotiation rather than combat, demonstrates that the threat of brutality can carry as much dramatic weight as brutality itself. This refusal to always pay off the tension with bloodshed is rare in a genre addicted to the eruption, and it reflects a sophisticated understanding of how suspense actually works. The audience that has learned to expect violence from the franchise becomes more frightened, not less, when a confrontation might resolve in any direction, when the outcome is genuinely uncertain. By sometimes withholding the eruption, the franchise makes every eruption that does come land harder, and makes every confrontation genuinely suspenseful rather than merely a countdown to the inevitable.

This rhythm of restraint also serves the franchise’s emotional architecture. The quiet aftermaths that follow the loud confrontations, the reckonings in which the protagonist processes what he has done, depend on the violence being rationed enough that the audience has the emotional space to feel its weight. A film that never stops fighting leaves no room for consequence to register. By pacing its violence carefully, by building dread and then sometimes withholding the release, the franchise ensures that when the cost arrives, the audience is positioned to feel it fully. The restraint is not a limitation. It is the mechanism that makes the brutality matter.

Comparing the Franchise’s Two Climaxes

The two installments each build toward a climactic confrontation, and placing these two finales side by side reveals more about the franchise’s evolution than any other comparison. The first film’s climax is intimate, psychological, and devastating. The second film’s is enormous, kinetic, and spectacular. Both are accomplished, but they represent different philosophies of what an climactic set-piece should be, and the difference between them is the difference between the two films.

The first film’s climactic confrontation between Hamza and Rehman is the payoff of an entire installment’s worth of character work. By the time the two men finally face each other in earnest, the audience understands everything that is at stake, not just physically but emotionally and morally. Hamza has spent the film studying this man, building a relationship with him, absorbing some of his coldness, and the confrontation becomes a referendum on how much of himself the agent has lost in the process. The violence is almost beside the point. What matters is the recognition passing between two men who have come to know each other intimately, one of whom has been lying the entire time. The first film understands that the most powerful climax is the one where the physical conflict carries the full weight of everything that preceded it, where every blow means something because of the relationship behind it.

The second film’s climax operates on a different scale entirely. The closing raid is the largest, most ambitious set-piece the franchise attempts, a kinetic spectacle of considerable craft and undeniable thrill. It delivers the blockbuster finale that commercial success demands, the bigger canvas, the higher stakes, the more abundant spectacle. And it is genuinely exciting, staged with skill and energy. But it is also where the franchise’s commitment to consequence comes under the most strain, where the grounded realism that defines its best work gives way to the demands of scale. The bodies fall a little easier. The hero absorbs a little more than physics should allow. The climax is magnificent, but it is magnificent in a more conventional register than the first film’s intimate reckoning.

The comparison crystallizes the franchise’s central tension. The first film’s climax is great because it is small, because it concentrates the entire emotional and moral weight of the story into a single intimate confrontation. The second film’s climax is impressive because it is large, because it opens the canvas and delivers spectacle on a grand scale. Both are valid approaches, and both are well executed, but they pull in opposite directions, and the gap between them maps the franchise’s journey from constrained intimacy to expansive spectacle. Which climax you prefer says a great deal about what you want from genre cinema, the concentrated emotional payoff or the expansive kinetic thrill, and the franchise’s willingness to attempt both is a measure of its ambition even where that ambition strains its principles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which Dhurandhar combat sequence is considered the best?

The bathhouse brawl from the first installment stands as the franchise’s finest piece of physical combat. It combines everything the films do well: decisive plot advancement, profound character revelation, impeccable technical craft, and genuine emotional weight. The fight strips away Hamza’s controlled exterior and forces the wounded man underneath to surface, and by the time it reaches its climax the audience is no longer sure whether they are watching an operative protect his mission or a broken man take revenge. It is grounded in friction and fatigue rather than spectacle, and it functions as the franchise’s thesis statement rendered as a single confrontation. No other beat in either film fuses so many virtues so completely, which is why it tops every serious ranking of the duology’s combat.

Q: Is the violence in Dhurandhar gratuitous?

The brutality is purposeful, not gratuitous, though the distinction requires some thought. The franchise is fundamentally a meditation on the cost of espionage, on what a state asks of the human beings it sends into danger, and that argument depends on the audience feeling the weight of what the protagonist does. If killing looked clean and consequence-free, the central moral inquiry would collapse. Crucially, the films often refuse to reward the cruelty with narrative payoff. The harshest interrogation in the first film yields worthless information, which is the franchise telling you that violence in this world is rarely clean and almost never redemptive. That refusal to launder brutality into useful results is precisely what separates purposeful violence from exploitation.

Q: How does Dhurandhar’s action compare to YRF spy films like Pathaan and War?

The franchise represents a deliberate rejection of the YRF spy spectacle model. Where films like Pathaan and War build their action around invincible heroes performing gravity-optional stunts, treating the agent as a brand and the body as a weapon, Dhurandhar builds its violence around vulnerability and consequence. Its protagonist is breakable, and he breaks. The action does not thrill in the conventional sense of triumphant spectacle; it thrills in the register of dread. This fundamental difference in philosophy means the two approaches are almost opposites despite sharing a genre. Our full comparison of Dhurandhar against the Bollywood spy tradition maps exactly where the franchise breaks from its predecessors and why the break matters for the genre’s future.

Q: Did Ranveer Singh perform his own stunts in Dhurandhar?

The franchise’s commitment to practical staging means the actor was clearly present for a significant portion of the physical work, whether performing stunts directly or closely shadowing them, and that physical reality contributes enormously to the sense of weight and risk. When the audience believes the performer is genuinely in the space and genuinely absorbing the impacts, the violence acquires a credibility that digital trickery cannot replicate. The conditioning the role demanded was extensive, but the franchise wisely keeps the focus on function, not display, presenting a hard, scarred body that serves the character rather than the marketing. The result is combat that feels physically true, grounded in a body subject to gravity, fatigue, and pain.

Q: Why is Dhurandhar rated A by the CBFC?

The franchise earned its adult certification through the unflinching, wet, consequential quality of its worst violence. The films refuse to sanitize killing, insisting instead that the audience register the full cost of what the characters do. This is a deliberate artistic choice, not a bid for shock value. A franchise arguing that espionage hollows out the soul cannot stage killing as bloodless fun, so the brutality is rendered with a seriousness that demands the adult rating. The certification is, in a sense, a badge of the franchise’s commitment to treating violence honestly rather than as weightless entertainment, and the films wear it as an emblem of their refusal to compromise the central argument.

Q: How many major fight sequences are in the Dhurandhar films?

Across both installments, the franchise stages roughly ten major set-pieces that anchor a serious ranking, ranging from the bathhouse brawl and the interrogation to the rooftop chase, the harbor firefight, the bridge ambush, the madrasa standoff, the car-bomb sequence, and the climactic raid that closes the second film. Beyond these headline confrontations, the duology is dense with smaller beats, the market escape, the controlled foot chase, the training flashbacks, and numerous tense standoffs that resolve with or without violence. The exact count depends on how you define a major sequence, but the franchise’s action is far richer than a simple tally suggests, permeating the whole fabric of the storytelling rather than confining itself to discrete showpieces.

Q: What makes Aditya Dhar’s fight direction different?

Dhar’s approach is organized around a single principle: consequence. In most commercial Hindi cinema, heroes absorb impossible punishment and walk it off, treating the body as a brand asset to be protected. Dhar rejects this completely. In his franchise, damage accumulates and stays, the hero limps in subsequent scenes, and the cost of violence remains visible throughout. He favors the readable long take over incoherent micro-cutting, grounds his fights in weight and fatigue rather than fantasy, and frequently stages violence that accomplishes nothing or the wrong thing, denying the audience the comfort of brutality justified by results. This insistence on aftermath and pain separates his work from both the polished spectacle of the spy machine and the operatic excess of mass cinema.

Q: Is the action better in Dhurandhar Part 1 or Part 2?

The first installment contains the franchise’s finest action, somewhat paradoxically because of its constraints. A smaller budget and a story rooted in the claustrophobic geography of Lyari forced Dhar toward intimacy, producing the bathhouse brawl, the interrogation, and the controlled chase. The second film, made with expanded resources, delivers larger and more polished set-pieces but occasionally trades the grounded weight that defined the first film’s violence for conventional spectacle. The hero survives encounters in the second film that the first film’s logic would have made fatal. This is not a fatal flaw, and the second film remains far more grounded than its peers, but the pattern is real and reflects what often happens when an artist who thrived under constraint is handed unlimited resources.

Q: How does the sound design contribute to the action?

The sound design is among the most sophisticated in recent Indian cinema and does enormous work in making the physical conflict land. The team understands that silence can be louder than noise, and the franchise’s most terrifying beats are frequently its quietest, the held breath before eruption, the ringing deafness after a blast. The harbor firefight famously collapses into a concussion-warped muffle after the protagonist takes a grazing round, pulling the audience inside his damaged perception. Sound also maps the dense vertical geography of Lyari, letting you hear pursuers before you see them. The musical score reinforces all of this by frequently withdrawing during the worst violence and returning only in the aftermath, scoring the consequence rather than the act.

Q: What is the bathhouse fight scene about?

The bathhouse brawl pits Hamza against a Dakait lieutenant who has begun to suspect the agent’s true allegiance, and the outcome determines whether the cover survives. What elevates it beyond a simple plot mechanism is how completely it strips away Hamza’s composure. The wet tile and slipping feet rob both combatants of their footing, forcing a clumsy, desperate struggle that feels genuinely like two men trying not to die rather than a choreographed display. As the fight progresses, the swaggering operative gives way to the furious, wounded man underneath, and by the climax the audience cannot tell whether they are watching Hamza protect his mission or Jaskirat take revenge on a stranger. It is the franchise’s psychological split made physical.

Q: Does Dhurandhar use a lot of CGI in its action?

The franchise leans heavily toward practical staging over digital enhancement wherever possible, and this choice is fundamental to its effect. When the bodies on screen feel like real bodies subject to gravity and fatigue, the violence acquires a physical truth that digital trickery cannot replicate. The combat favors real locations, real impacts, and performers genuinely present in the space, and the difference is palpable in the weight and credibility of every confrontation. There is digital work, as there is in any modern production of this scale, but it is deployed in service of the practical staging rather than as a replacement for it, and the franchise’s grounded realism is a direct result of this commitment to physical authenticity.

Q: How does the interrogation scene work as a combat sequence?

Some viewers object that an interrogation is not action at all, but that misunderstands the franchise. Physical coercion is the most morally loaded form of violence the duology stages, and this scene is its darkest hour. Hamza must extract information from a man he privately suspects is innocent, and Dhar stages it without music, in flat institutional light, holding on faces longer than comfort allows. The horror is not in graphic gore but in the protagonist’s face as he does the work, the dissonance between his steady hands and his dead eyes. When the information turns out to be worthless, the franchise drives home its argument that violence in this world is rarely clean and almost never redemptive. It ranks among the very best beats precisely because of this moral weight.

Q: What real events inspired the violence in Dhurandhar?

The franchise draws on a constellation of real events and figures from the recent history of cross-border conflict and the Karachi underworld, reorganizing them into a single espionage narrative rather than dramatizing any one event directly. The Lyari setting, the underworld power structures, and certain characters are clearly informed by real-world counterparts, and the violence carries the weight of this history without being enslaved to it. The result is action that could only happen in this specific world, shaped by the particular power structures, loyalties, and economies of the place. This grounding in real texture, handled with appropriate gravity rather than exploitation, is part of what makes the violence feel lived-in rather than borrowed from generic genre templates.

Q: Why does the franchise focus so much on the cost of violence?

The franchise’s true subject is the relationship between violence and identity. Hamza’s tragedy is that the brutality his work requires slowly remakes him into something he never chose to be, eroding the line between the man he pretends to be and the man he was. The action is not separate from this theme; it is the theme made physical. When we watch Hamza fight, we watch identity dissolve in real time, a man becoming his mask through the repeated performance of his mask’s violence. This focus on cost elevates the action from genre exercise to something approaching tragedy, the recognition that what we do to others we ultimately do to ourselves. It is the franchise’s most profound argument, and the violence is its most visceral expression.

Q: Is the action in Dhurandhar realistic?

The franchise is unusually rigorous about the texture of how violence actually works. The gunplay honors the reality that firearms jam, run dry, and miss, that a firefight is a frantic exercise in cover and reloading rather than a balletic exchange of perfect shots. The hand-to-hand combat is unglamorous and practical, built from the brutal close-quarters techniques of men trained to incapacitate rather than perform. The tradecraft reflects the actual discipline of deep-cover work, the constant awareness of exits and the careful calibration of how much violence is necessary versus how much would blow a cover. This procedural accuracy grounds the violence in a reality that the fantasy action of the spectacle machine never approaches, and it is foundational to the franchise’s credibility.

Q: What is the rooftop chase sequence?

The rooftop chase is a long-take pursuit that follows Hamza across three buildings while gunfire chips the parapets around him, trapping the viewer in unbroken duration. It represents the franchise at its most technically dazzling, a single fluid camera move that denies the audience the relief a cut would provide. The dread it generates comes precisely from this continuity; you cannot escape the danger any more than the character can. It ranks among the franchise’s best beats for craft and immersion, though slightly lower for character revelation, since it is more about pure survival than psychological exposure. The technical achievement alone justifies its high placement, and the relentless grip it maintains on the audience pushes it higher still.

Q: How does Dhurandhar handle the deaths of minor characters?

The franchise’s stated commitment is to treat every death as the death of a person, not the clearing of an obstacle, and at its best it honors this beautifully, staging even anonymous henchmen so the audience registers them as human beings caught in a brutal world. When a Lyari foot soldier dies badly in a doorway, the staging insists you see him as a person. That said, this is one of the areas where the franchise is inconsistent. In some of the larger set-pieces, particularly in the second film, anonymous antagonists fall with a disposability the franchise elsewhere refuses. This gap between the moral seriousness of the major confrontations and the relative carelessness of the minor ones is a genuine flaw the duology never fully resolves.

Q: What are the weaknesses of Dhurandhar’s action?

Despite its excellence, the franchise’s action has real flaws. The most significant is the second film’s drift toward conventional spectacle, a genuine regression that betrays the consequence-driven principles of the first film, letting the hero absorb punishment that earlier logic would have made fatal. There is also a problem of repetition; the duology returns again and again to the same scenario of the cornered agent, and by the second film a certain predictability sets in. The treatment of minor antagonists is sometimes more functional than the franchise’s moral seriousness promises. And the relentless grimness occasionally tips into self-satisfied bleakness that serves the filmmaker’s seriousness more than the audience’s understanding. These flaws do not negate the achievement, but acknowledging them is what separates criticism from fandom.

Q: How does Dhurandhar’s action compare to Aditya Dhar’s earlier war film?

Dhar’s earlier feature staged its violence with a clean, righteous energy, the controlled aggression of soldiers executing a sanctioned mission, where the enemy was external and the cause was just. Dhurandhar profoundly complicates that approach. Here the violence is morally murky, the hero’s hands are dirty, and the clean righteousness of the war film gives way to the queasy ambiguity of espionage. The franchise’s action is, in a sense, an argument with the filmmaker’s own earlier work, a recognition that the real cost of these conflicts cannot be captured by clean heroism. Our side-by-side study of Dhar’s two defining films explores this dialogue in full, and the action is where the difference between his two visions of violence is most legible.

Q: Will there be more action in future Dhurandhar films?

The franchise has built its identity on grounded, consequential violence, and any future installment would have to reckon with the tension the second film exposed between the franchise’s principles and the marketplace’s appetite for ever-larger spectacle. The most interesting path forward would be a return to the intimacy and weight that made the first film’s action so distinctive, resisting the temptation to simply enlarge what came before. The psychological hollowing of the protagonist, the way violence has remade Hamza into something he never chose to be, offers rich territory for future combat that foregrounds cost over scale. Whether the franchise chooses depth or magnitude will determine whether its action continues to matter as cinema or settles into the spectacle it once so pointedly refused.

Q: How does Dhurandhar use long takes in its action?

The long take is Dhar’s signature weapon, deployed with discipline rather than showmanship. A lesser director uses the unbroken shot to announce his own virtuosity; Dhar uses it to trap the viewer inside the duration of an event, denying the relief that a cut would provide. When the camera follows Hamza through a running gun battle across three rooftops without cutting away, the effect is not awe at the technical feat, though the feat is real, but dread, because the audience cannot escape the continuity of the danger any more than the character can. This use of unbroken duration to generate anxiety rather than admiration is one of the franchise’s most distinctive technical choices, and it is inseparable from why the violence feels so immersive and inescapable.

Q: Is Dhurandhar’s action suitable for casual viewers or only cinephiles?

The franchise rewards both audiences, though it asks more of them than conventional spectacle does. Casual viewers will find the confrontations genuinely thrilling, tense, and viscerally engaging, the immersive sound design and grounded staging delivering excitement on a purely sensory level. But the franchise also rewards close attention in ways that enrich the experience enormously. The viewer who tracks how Hamza fights differently depending on which self is in control, who notices the franchise’s refusal to reward cruelty with results, who registers the careful rhythm of restraint, will find layers of meaning beneath the surface excitement. The action works as entertainment and as serious cinema simultaneously, which is precisely the balance the best genre filmmaking achieves.

Q: What is the significance of the harbor firefight?

The harbor firefight is a brutal eruption lasting barely ninety seconds of screen time, yet it kills three named characters and reshapes the entire power structure of the Karachi underworld. Its significance lies partly in this ruthless efficiency, the way it accomplishes more narratively in ninety seconds than most films manage in extended set-pieces, and partly in its extraordinary subjective sound design. After the protagonist takes a grazing round to the skull, the mix collapses into a concussion-warped muffle, and the audience experiences the rest of the firefight through his damaged hearing. This places us inside his compromised perception, transforming the sequence from something we watch into something we survive alongside him. It is the franchise’s clearest demonstration that lethal violence does not get a victory lap.

Q: How does the franchise show Hamza’s two identities through fighting?

Ranveer Singh uses his body differently depending on which self is in control, and an attentive viewer can read the seam between Jaskirat and Hamza purely from how the body moves. When Hamza performs for the underworld, his physicality is loose, confident, almost swaggering, the body language of a man who belongs. When the cover slips and the wounded Jaskirat surfaces, the shoulders draw in, the movements become sharper and more grief-driven. In the bathhouse brawl, you can watch this transition happen in real time as the fight strips away his composure. The combat is where the franchise’s central psychological split becomes visible flesh, and Singh’s physical performance makes the dissolution of identity legible without a single line of dialogue.

Q: Why do critics praise Dhurandhar’s editing in its fight scenes?

The franchise’s editing favors comprehension over chaos, rejecting the prevailing fashion of rapid micro-cutting that conveys energy at the expense of clarity. Shots are held long enough for the eye to read what is happening, for the spatial relationships between combatants to register, for the viewer to track who is where and what just changed. When the cutting accelerates, it accelerates for a specific reason, then slows again so the consequence can land. The franchise also understands the power of the withheld cut, the refusal to relieve tension by moving the camera away, which it uses to devastating effect in the interrogation. This disciplined rhythm, the cut always serving meaning rather than disguising the absence of it, is why the violence feels coherent where so much genre action feels like a blur.

Q: Does Dhurandhar’s action work without having seen Aditya Dhar’s other films?

The action is fully comprehensible and effective on its own terms, requiring no prior familiarity with the filmmaker’s earlier work. The franchise establishes its own logic of consequence, its own grammar of grounded violence, and its own psychological stakes entirely within the duology. That said, viewers familiar with Dhar’s earlier war film will find an extra layer of meaning in how Dhurandhar complicates the clean righteousness of that earlier approach, trading moral clarity for queasy ambiguity. The action reads as an argument with the filmmaker’s own past, but this is enrichment rather than prerequisite. A first-time viewer with no knowledge of the director’s filmography will still feel the full weight of the violence and understand exactly what the franchise is arguing about the cost of espionage.