Dhurandhar: The Revenge — Ranveer Soars, the Runtime Sags

If one Hindi film has split living-room arguments down the middle this year, it is Dhurandhar: The Revenge. Ranveer Singh's spy-revenge epic, directed by Aditya Dhar, landed in cinemas on 19 March 2026 and arrived on JioHotstar on 4 June 2026 — and the reaction has been anything but settled. Some viewers walked out calling it the most intense thing they've seen on a big screen in years. Others walked out checking their watches. Both camps are right about something, and that tension is the whole story.

This is a balanced read, not a hype piece. So here is what genuinely works, what genuinely doesn't, and why the audience and the critics seem to have watched two different films.

What the film is, in plain terms

The Dhurandhar saga follows an undercover Indian intelligence operative who burrows deep into a hostile criminal and political network, living a double life under constant threat of exposure. Ranveer plays Hamza Ali Mazari, the agent at the centre of it all, and The Revenge pushes that premise into darker, bloodier territory — a man settling scores while the ground shifts under him.

The ensemble is heavy: Arjun Rampal, Sanjay Dutt, R. Madhavan and Sara Arjun fill out a world of handlers, rivals and enemies. The scale is enormous, the tone is grim, and the violence is not stylised away. This is an A-rated film that earns the rating and then some.

The thing nearly everyone agrees on: Ranveer

For all the disagreement, there's a rare point of consensus. Ranveer Singh's performance is the film's spine, and even sceptical reviewers concede it. He dials down the loud, grinning showmanship that made his name and plays Hamza as coiled and watchful — a man holding several lies in his head at once.

That restraint is the surprise. Several trade voices have called it among his finest work to date, and the audience clearly feels it too. When the pacing wobbles, it is usually Ranveer who keeps a scene upright. If you watch this film for one reason, it's to see a flamboyant star choose stillness and make it land.

The two big complaints

Now the other side, because an honest review owes you that.

• The length. The film runs close to four hours, and that is the single most common gripe. Even admirers admit it sprawls. Sequences that should snap instead stretch, and the back half asks a lot of your stamina.
• The violence. This is a punishing watch. Some critics found it gratuitous to the point of numbing, and international reviewers in particular pushed back hard, arguing the film leans on brutality where tension would have done more.

There's also a logic problem that crops up in several reviews: the screenplay mixes grounded spycraft with near-superhero invincibility, and the seams show. Whether that reads as crowd-pleasing bravado or lazy plotting depends entirely on the viewer — which is exactly the divide at the heart of this film's reception.

Critics versus the crowd

The scoreboard tells the story better than any single review. On the major critic aggregators, the film sits low — roughly 35% positive on the Rotten Tomatoes meter, reflecting genuine reservations about runtime, tone and substance.

Then look at the user side. The film has reportedly been running an IMDb rating near 8.7 and a BookMyShow score around 9.5 off hundreds of thousands of votes. That is an unusually wide canyon between the professionals and the ticket-buyers. A gap that large usually means a film is delivering hard on spectacle and star power while critics weigh structure and restraint and find them wanting. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a textbook case.

Neither number is the "truth." Aggregator scores compress dozens of nuanced reviews into one figure, and user ratings skew toward fans who showed up opening weekend already invested. Read both, and the real picture emerges: a film that thrills its target audience and frustrates viewers looking for tightness and meaning.

The box office, with the honest caveats

Commercially, there is no argument that this was one of the year's biggest Hindi draws. Trade trackers reported the film crossing ₹1,000 crore worldwide within its early run, a genuinely rare feat for a Hindi release and a clear signal that the divisive reviews did nothing to dent footfalls.

Beyond that, treat the bigger superlatives with care. Claims about lifetime worldwide totals and all-time records have been circulating, but final certified figures of that kind are still being tallied and reconciled, and they should be read as awaited rather than settled. What's solid is the shape of it: huge opening, strong word of mouth among its core audience, and a theatrical run that comfortably outran the critical doubts.

The streaming chapter only underlined the demand. On its first weekend on JioHotstar, the film reportedly drew tens of millions of viewers — by one account around 50 million — making it a streaming event in its own right and giving the fence-sitters who skipped a four-hour cinema trip an easier way in.

So, should you watch it?

It depends honestly on what you want from a Saturday night.

Watch it if you like big, muscular, high-stakes action, you're drawn to a star reinventing his register, and you can sit with a long, heavy, violent film without flinching. The scale is real, the craft in the set-pieces is real, and Hamza Ali Mazari is a genuinely memorable lead turn.

Think twice if you prefer lean, fast, logically airtight thrillers, or if graphic violence puts you off. The runtime is a commitment, the brutality is relentless, and the script's wilder leaps will test anyone keeping score on realism.

What Dhurandhar: The Revenge proves is something Indian cinema keeps relearning: a film can underwhelm the critics and still own the conversation, as long as it gives a huge audience exactly the ride it came for. This one did — and the loud argument about whether it deserved to is, in a way, the surest sign it connected.