Animal is regarded as the gold standard of hypermasculine gore and violence on Indian screen. Dhurandhar, another Bollywood movie (to be released on December 5), is getting likened to that Ranbir Kapoor-Sandeep Reddy Vanga movie.
The trailer of Dhurandhar was released on Tuesday. The blood-soaked sequences (beheadings, shootings, slow-mo brutality) have turned off family audiences and triggered "violence fatigue." X users called it "unbearable", with one saying that Bollywood has lost the plot. Comparisons to Animal (2023) abound, with accusations of copying its over-the-topness without freshness. Some fear it glorifies vengeance, but this is purely a Leftist point. The film attempts to show how the Indian defence establishment has been responding to Pakistan's 'Bleed India by a thousand cuts' policy.
Dhurandhar is one of the most ambitious movies from Bollywood in recent times. Set in Pakistan's Lyari ganglands, it reimagines real figures (e.g., Akshaye Khanna as gangster Rehman Dakait, Sanjay Dutt as cop Chaudhry Aslam) in an anti-terror narrative. If the movie becomes a hit (the trailer is terrific in the way it introduces different characters and builds drama around them), Ranveer Singh and director Adithya Dhar will have offered Bollywood a huge respite.
