At one heartstopping point in the craggy narrative, a shop’s shutter is hurled down on the necks of prostate victims…. Never seen this method of murder before. Never seen so much slaying… all for a cause, of course. No sacrifice, and by extension, no mayhem, is too much to save your country from extraneous threats.
’Iss mulk ki Sarhad ko koi choo nahin sakta’, Mohammed Rafi sang in a spy thriller Aankhen decades ago. Those films about preserving the sanctity of the Indian border seem like child’s prayers compared to Dhurandhar and its companion piece which opened today to a roaring ovation.
Can writer-director Aditya Dhar fail with his patriotic pitch? The mood is more murderous and unforgiving this time than it was in the earlier film. The surprise element is missing, except for two very forced surprises at the interval and the climax.
This is more of the same sock-in-the-solar plexus, mayhem multiplied by many times, and yet not gratuitous. It’s more like a dirty job being done, as someone has to do it. Many unforeseen methods of torture and murder pop up in this four-hour flood fest of blood and gore, which, let me hasten to add, is never a bore. God forbid!
This is no place for the squeamish. The violence includes severed heads and limbs. By the time we get to the one-to-one combat between Hamza (Ranveer Singh) and Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), the mood is relentlessly angry and unforgiving. Limbs are brutally severed, a tongue is painfully squeezed by a son who thinks his father talks too much (lucky the father doesn’t pee too much), an enemy’s limbs are repeatedly impaled in a milk factory while the perpetrator sips on milkshake (milking the violence for all it is worth). In one lengthy scuffle in a loo, Hamza’s adversary ends up with a knife in his eye.
So much of the playing time goes into choreographed violence. At times, hurling storytelling often feels like a pretext for the brilliant action. Did Dhar first conceive ways to make the enemy moan in pain before writing a patriotic plot around the storytelling?
As a compilation of action choreography, Dhurandhar The Revenge works wonderfully well. This is a very angry film. There is little relief , comic or erotic. No item song like the first one. I missed that. I missed Aditya Dhar’s aesthetics as applied to the softer shades of filmmaking. The mood of rage reigns. The women are barely given a voice. Sara Arjun, who was so assertive in her limited space in the first film, is here an absence rather than a presence. Even Yami Gautam gets a passing nod, her cameo barely registering its presence.
More than Ranveer Singh’s borderless vendetta, it is the violence that rules this cataclysmic action film’s skyline. The rusty brown skin tone of the frames lends itself most effectively to the excessive zeal to get even with the terror academy.
There is an absence of restraint in the way the enemies are neutralized to amp up the let’s-get-them narrative. Dawood Ibrahim is portrayed as a helpless vegetable, and the rest of the bad boys just don’t seem to know what to do with their guns once they finish mowing down anyone who comes in their way.
Shashwat Sachdev’s music is overwhelmingly eclectic. Why are Bappi Lahiri’s Tamma tamma and Boney M’s Rasputin a part of the soundtrack when neither complements the narrative? The songs are more like reminders of the fun factor in the action sequences rather than indicative of the actual mood of the moment.
Dhurandhar The Revenge is not any better than the first segment. It doesn’t try to be. The world is still a dangerous place, especially for those who are protecting us from enemies. We can only be participants by proxy, partaking in the guilty pleasure of watching the enemies being neutralized. For this, we are grateful to Aditya Dhar.
