Dhurandhar: The Revenge Review, Ratings and Audience Verdict – Ranveer Singhs Career-Best

Dhurandhar: The Revenge, Aditya Dhar’s 229-minute sequel to the highest-grossing Hindi film ever, released on March 19, 2026, to an India that had already bought 14.81 lakh tickets in advance on BookMyShow alone, a record that had previously belonged to Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan. The film opened to a divided response: fans who came for Ranveer Singh‘s Hamza and left stunned by a climax twist they didn’t see coming, and critics who found the film’s political framing and its punishing runtime harder to sit through than its action set pieces. Nearly four hours in the cinema. One man at the centre. And a conversation about Bollywood’s appetite for unapologetic nationalistic spectacle that will outlast the opening weekend.

What Is Dhurandhar: The Revenge About?

Picking up directly from the events of Dhurandhar (2025), the sequel finds Ranveer Singh’s undercover operative Hamza Ali Mazari, now the undisputed King of Lyari, consolidating power inside Karachi’s criminal-political nexus while the 26/11 Mumbai attacks loom closer in the film’s internal timeline. Director Aditya Dhar uses real geopolitical flashpoints — the 1999 IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, and the 2008 Mumbai attacks — as structural pillars for Hamza’s vendetta mission. A pivotal sequence puts Hamza face to face with a character based on Dawood Ibrahim, and it is the kind of audacious narrative choice that defines what this franchise is willing to attempt. The film also integrates actual transcripts of conversations between the 26/11 attackers and their handlers, blurring the line between dramatised fiction and documented history in a way few mainstream Bollywood films have attempted.

The runtime breakdown: a 107-minute first half and a second half that stretches past two hours, giving the sequel a total domestic runtime of 229 minutes (the overseas cut runs 235). Director Dhar had submitted a longer cut to the CBFC, which trimmed 94 seconds across 21 edits, primarily removing extreme violence including beheadings and eye-gouging sequences. What remains is still brutal, violent enough for an A-certificate, and unsparing in its depiction of Karachi’s underworld.

What Works in Dhurandhar: The Revenge?

The consensus among audiences is clear on one point: Ranveer Singh has delivered the performance of his career. Across multiple reactions posted on X, the verdict on his portrayal of Hamza is consistent. As one reviewer put it, “nobody could have done it better, such films usually turn out to be one-man shows but Dhurandhar 2 is different — it has great characters at every turn.” That last part is key, because the supporting performances give the film genuine depth beyond its leading man.

R. Madhavan, playing IB Director Ajay Sanyal, has been singled out repeatedly as the film’s emotional anchor. Multiple reviewers called him the film’s real hero, with one noting, “Madhavan delivers, I loved every scene he was in, he is the hero of this film.” Sanjay Dutt as SP Chaudhary Aslam brings the kind of lived-in menace that the franchise built around his character in Part 1, and audience response has called his work here a career peak. Then there is Rakesh Bedi, playing Jameel Jamali, who has emerged as the unexpected standout of the sequel. His climax scenes have generated specific praise, with reviewers saying the film would have been significantly less watchable without him.

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The interval block has been called one of the best in recent Bollywood memory, and the reason it works is precisely because of what it withholds: there is no action, no swelling music, just a single piece of dialogue that reframes everything before it. Shashwat Sachdev‘s background score has been praised widely, with one audience member describing it as “another character” that elevates the film at every turn. The production design, recreating Karachi’s Lyari neighbourhood with visual specificity, and the action choreography from Ram-Laxman and Nabakanth have also drawn consistent praise. The Chapter 1 Hamza backstory and the King of Lyari sequences in the first half hit particularly hard, with one reviewer noting they were reminded of The Kashmir Files in their emotional intensity.

What Does Not Work in Dhurandhar: The Revenge?

The length is the most common criticism, and it is a legitimate one. At 229 minutes, the film’s second act editing comes under sustained scrutiny from audiences who felt the pacing in the middle stretch could not match the energy of the bookends. “The editing seemed way off in the second act — the movie was racy there but somehow good BGM and editing could have made it so much better,” wrote one reviewer who still gave the film 3 out of 5. Several audience members noted that the film’s structure felt better suited to a limited series than a single theatrical experience, particularly in the cat-and-mouse sequences that make up the second half’s connective tissue.

The music has been a more surprising point of contention. Dhurandhar Part 1 produced several standout tracks and a memorable score. Part 2’s songs have been found wanting by a vocal section of the audience, with the exception of one or two moments. The first 30 minutes have also been flagged for stretched pacing before the film finds its rhythm. Then there is the political dimension. Scroll.in described the film as “more of everything — gore, cheerleading, propaganda,” placing it alongside The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story in what critics have termed “sarkari cinema.” Aditya Dhar has never pretended otherwise. Before release, according to a post from @AdityaDharFilms on X, the director asked audiences not to reveal plot points and hinted at a post-credits twist, a signal that he is already thinking franchise-first. The film picks a political side, loudly and without apology, and audiences will walk in with that knowledge and draw their own conclusions.

How Does Dhurandhar: The Revenge Compare to Part 1?

This is where the audience is most divided. Part 1 was a tighter film by most accounts, clocking fewer minutes and introducing its world with the urgency of a first act. The sequel carries the weight of expectation differently. Its first act is arguably superior, its climax is widely agreed to be spectacular and its central performances are stronger. But the second act, where the film loses momentum before recovering, costs it the consistency that made Part 1 feel relentless from start to finish. The honest summary: Dhurandhar: The Revenge has higher peaks than Part 1 and lower valleys. Whether you prefer the sequel depends largely on which of those you weight more heavily.

What Are the Numbers Behind This Release?

Dhurandhar: The Revenge became the first Bollywood film in history to cross Rs 200 crore in gross advance sales worldwide. Its BookMyShow tally of 14.81 lakh tickets pre-release broke the platform’s all-time record, surpassing Jawan‘s 11.02 lakh. Paid preview screenings on the evening of March 18 generated approximately Rs 44-47 crore net in India alone. The film is produced by B62 Studios and Jio Studios, with Jio Studios renewing its first-look deal with Aditya Dhar ahead of this release, signalling that the Dhurandhar universe is far from finished.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is not a film that wants to be argued about on neutral terms. It is designed to provoke a response — in the cinema, and in the culture. For audiences who buy into its world completely, it delivers the kind of theatrical experience that justifies every one of its 229 minutes. For those who do not, the length and the politics will be the walls they cannot scale. Either way, the film proves that Aditya Dhar has built something that Indian cinema has not seen before: a spy franchise with the commercial muscle of an event film and a directorial vision specific enough to be genuinely divisive. That combination, at this scale, is its own kind of achievement.