Review of Dhurandhar on Four Point Framework
Dhurandhar, is directed by Aditya Dhar and starring Ranveer Singh. It grossed over 1,305 crore worldwide as the highest-grossing original Hindi film of 2025. Its sequel, Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge, crossed 1000 crore worldwide in just 7 days. Both are praised by Ram Gopal Verma (RGV). Critics claim that movie is propaganda. Let me first deal with propaganda part first.
Propaganda
When a word like propaganda is used for fictional movie, it betrays emotional despair. Fiction is always a narrative and therefore it is always a propaganda by its author.
But the real test is by audience. Does it appreciate the intelligence of audience or ridicule it. For decades Hindi cinema did the latter. Then came OTT and movies from all over world were there to see. People watched the best propaganda and left the poor narratives. Hindi cinema suffered the worst decade in past 80 years. Then comes Dhuranghar with its geopolitical messaging. But it did not disrupt emotional engagement. Audiences which for decades saw terrorists attack all around them felt connected rather enthused to see the justice being served at least on screen..
Why Was Dhurandhar Successful?
There are many reviews of the movie. Mostly emotional or civilizational which give their reasons for success. Question is: Is there a scientific framework which may provide parameters for its success?
Actually there is and this has been tested on many movies. It can be used to explain the success of Dhurandhar and its sequel. It is a Four Point Framework which was explained here.
Dhurandhar excels on all the points. Remember the word excel. The framework is a structure on which sound movies exist but to excel, each structure must be finetuned and carefully built around a story and its portrayal. Usual flop movies lack this structure itself. Let me explain the structure or framework, one by one.
Anchor Character is where Dhurandhar scores highest. A story is either told by the anchor or through him.The characters work for the anchor as it is his or her story or it emanate from him or her.
The anchor must act like gravity, invisible until everything starts falling toward it. Radha of Sholay barely moved yet the entire film’s moral weight rested on her silence. All players were working to ensure revenge for her injustice.
Ajay Sanyal in Dhurandhar is the anchor of the story but more active. He is seeking revenge for Mother India. He speaks, he directs, he carries psychological burden, yet he never competes with Hamza for spectacle. He is like M in 007 movies. The anchor holds precisely because it does not grab.
Real historical figures make powerful anchor templates because audiences arrive with pre-loaded emotional context. They already know the weight of the office. The filmmaker only needs to dramatize it faithfully, which is considerably easier than building that weight from scratch.
In most movies, the protagonist is the anchor as well. this often confuses movie makers like RGV, we will discuss in a moment.
Emotional Engagement clearly works. Audience loves it and hates it. There is no indifference to it. A movie does not earn 1300 crore on indifference. Audiences are invested in the Anchor’s revenge so they come to watch and get emotionally involved in the protagonist’s survival and mission. The box office numbers suggest the engagement is visceral.
Costume Schema in a spy thriller is almost purpose-built for this principle. Anchor is always in his mission dress. He gets casual near climax, when audience is intense at the edge of their seats. The visual identity of an undercover agent as nobody moved on to appearance of a gangster boss. The deliberate shifts in appearance across missions, gives costume a narrative function rather than a decorative one. Later on, audience can be shown a costume and they will tell the stage of story.
Meta-Remake and Innovation is the most interesting presentation. Aditya Dhar previously made Uri, which redefined the Bollywood action film by grounding spectacle in procedural realism. Dhurandhar extends that into spy-thriller territory, which for Hindi cinema is genuinely novel. It is thriller in which romance precede revenge. The antagonist remains an object of romance. Each exist in separate compartment. It is not remaking a prior film but remaking a genre.
Sequel of Dhurandhar
In Dhurandhar 1, everyone was watching Ranveer. Everyone was debating Madhavan’s Doval parallel. And Akshay Khanna’s Rehman Dakait walked in as villain and outshined both without anyone predicting it.
It means the Rehman’s dominance was not manufactured through marketing or screen time allocation. It emerged organically from the character’s design, which is the only way the glamorized villain factor genuinely works. Manufactured menace is just spectacle. Organic menace around the life of Rehman waves him deeper into the story. He becomes a step stone for the success of the story.
That is exactly what Gabbar did in Sholay. Dharmendra and Amitabh were the marketed proposition. Amjad Khan became the cultural memory.
This also explains why the sequel works where many sequels fail. Most sequels lose momentum because they rebuild around the action protagonist’s next mission. If Aditya Dhar has kept Ajay Sanyal as the bookending anchor, the architecture holds regardless of how different Hamza’s new mission is.
Though everyone missed Rehman in the sequel but story did not. This gives Dhurandhar 2 a near-perfect score on all four parameters. Madhavan as anchor, Ranveer as emotional engagement vehicle.
In the sequel, Major Iqbal comes out of shadow. He is another glamorized villain, and the costume schema presumably serving the spy-thriller realism consistently throughout. His costume schema is worked up more. He trims his hair to improve the schema. Audience do not understand but notice the appearance getting more gritty.
Casting
There were no stars in movie. Only characters playing their role. I had doubt about the role of Sanjay Dutt as SP Aslam. But widow of Aslam, in an interview said that he was like that. That again is a good casting. Late Aslam liked to behave like Sanjay Dutt in his life.
Sanjay Dutt was not playing a character. The character was already playing Sanjay Dutt in real life. The widow’s confirmation collapses the distance between performance and reality entirely, which is the most powerful form of emotional engagement possible. Audiences sense authenticity without being able to articulate why. They just feel it is real.
The entire cast was selected on the principle of role-fit over marquee value. Madhavan fits the quiet intellectual authority of Doval. Akshay Khanna fits the unpredictable menace of Rehman Dakait. And Sanjay Dutt, whose own life has been loudly cinematic, fits a Pakistani SP who apparently lived like a Bollywood character. Jamil Jamali is hilarious without being a comedian. He is fun to watch but he is neither hero nor villain. His fluidity takes him to different scenes in the movie keeping stranger moments as familiar.
There are 30 real life villains (terrorists) weaved in the story. It was amazing how Dhar kept track and their relevance was weaved into story. The casting itself became a form of documentary realism without announcing itself as one.
This is where Aditya Dhar surpasses most directors who attempt realism. They impose realism as an aesthetic choice. He embedded it in the casting decisions before the camera rolled. The film’s authenticity was structurally guaranteed before a single shot.
It also strengthens costume schema parameter in an unexpected way. When the actor’s own persona is the costume, the schema achieves perfect coherence at zero effort. There is no gap between the person and the role for the audience’s eye to catch.
The Canvas
This movie tells that this four point framework is actually five point framework. The fifth being the Canvas. The sets. The grotesque violence. The flying vehicles. The exploding train. This component merge with costume schema in a family or romantic drama but takes an independent identity in an action movie like Dhurandhar. Camera do not just capture the characters, it captures the canvas with characters on it.
Characters walks on canvas. They have no personal space. They are never in isolation. Only anchor gets the break. Movie is always in canvas. The Canvas is old-time Russian Circus. The show goes on. Circus keeps evolving. Protagonist is the circus. The sets are the canvas drawn by Dhar with great care and diligence.
RGV Doesn’t Get It.
This method works and Film maker like Ram Gopal Verma (RGV) does not understand it.
Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) has indeed been extremely vocal about Dhurandhar 2. He has been on a media blitz, calling the film a “cinematic disruptor” that will effectively “kill” traditional Bollywood storytelling. RGV is praising all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons, and that is the core problem. Look at his movies.
Satya had a perfect anchor in Bhiku Mhatre, whose loyalty and eventual destruction carried every emotional beat. The villain Bhau was a textbook glamorized villain, powerful enough to overshadow the protagonist. Costume schema was gritty and consistent with the Mumbai underworld reality. All four parameters firing simultaneously, but RGV had no idea why.
Then success gave him a theory. The theory was wrong. He concluded that gritty realism, non-linear storytelling and shock aesthetics were the causes, when they were merely the surface texture of films that happened to also have strong anchors and emotional engagement. So he started replicating the texture without the architecture.
Company partially worked because Ajay Devgn’s Malik was still a functioning anchor. But as RGV’s “theory” hardened, the anchor kept weakening across subsequent films because he was consciously designing against the hero-centric structure without understanding what should replace it. Removing the godly hero is only half the job. You need the anchor to absorb that displaced weight.
His recent flops are essentially controlled experiments that validate the Four Point Framework from the negative side. Same director, same aesthetic sensibility, same anti-formula instinct, but no anchor, no emotional engagement, no glamorized villain with narrative support. The variables 4 point framework identifies are precisely what went missing.
He succeeded by accident and failed by theory.
RGV’s Review of Dhurandhar
RGV argues that Aditya Dhar has destroyed the trope of the invincible hero. He praised Ranveer Singh’s character (Hamza/Jaskirat) for being a “real” hero who bleeds, feels pain, and makes morally grey choices. This is actually a description of emotional engagement mechanics, not the cause of success.
He attributes the film’s success to visceral realism and psychological layering, which are storytelling technique variables. Filmmakers who copy the realism without building a proper anchor will fail, and RGV’s own filmography after Satya illustrates this perfectly.
RGV makes a point about Ranveer “disappearing into the story” is actually evidence for the anchor principle, not against it. The protagonist recedes because the anchor character carries the gravitational weight. RGV notices the effect but attributes it to Ranveer’s acting modesty rather than the structural decision to place the real anchor elsewhere.
The “egalitarian character treatment” point is another glaring error. There was no such thing in Dhurandhar or in any other movie. Story dictate the character not any ideology. How RGV saw it, is difficult to see.
His “realistic action” argument is the weakest of all. Realism is a costume schema choice, not a structural principle. The question costume scheme framework asks is whether the visual language consistently serves character identity and narrative tone. If it does, whether it is realistic or stylized is irrelevant. Agneepath was operatic and unrealistic yet visually coherent. Dhurandhar is rustic and charismatic in its own world.
RGV is conflating aesthetic preference with structural validity.
The documentary-drama blend point is genuinely interesting but RGV still frames it as bravery rather than asking whether it serves emotional engagement or disrupts it.
His conclusion that masala movies are finished is historically illiterate. Every decade produces one movie that appears to end the old template, and the template survives because it delivers anchor, engagement and villain in a well cooked story that has ability to reach the mind and hearts of audience.
Actuality
Anchor starts the movie and ends the movie. That is not so invisible. He is mastermind not the action hero. The story begins in his mind and concludes with his judgment. Everything Hamza does in between is essentially Ajay Sanyal’s will made physical.
Madhavan’s portrayal has been a major talking point because, much like the other roles RGV mentioned, it avoids the “superhero” tropes. Instead of being an action-heavy lead, his character is the tactical mastermind. He is the “brain” behind the cross-border operations.
His performance is focused on the quiet, high-stakes psychological chess matches that define modern intelligence work. RGV actually touched on this in his interviews as well, noting that the “mastermind” characters in this film aren’t just there to give orders; they are written with a specific sense of burden and realism that reflects the actual gravity of their real-life counterparts.
RGV noticed the performance. He still does not see that Madhavan’s character is the reason Ranveer’s character works at all.
RGV’s conclusion about the “party being over” is where he falls back into impressionism. The party ends only for filmmakers who copied the formula without understanding the architecture. Those who understand what actually made Dhurandhar 2 work, the five parameters, can replicate the success in entirely different genres.
In fact the party has just begun.
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