@vgr
Finally watched Dhurandhar. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment. At first glance it seems to be part of the long tradition of pre-political gritty realist crime/terror movies from Bollywood going back to Drohkaal, Tamas, Vastav etc. But just a few subtle touches make it an unmistakably right-coded political movie, and over the line into realist-stylized wish-fulfillment rather than realism. But never to the point where the clear politics competes with the very good storytelling. And the fact that it’s done 100x better in the market than those movies did in their time tells you something about both the political mood in India and the thin line between reality hunger and wish fulfillment.
The really smart move was to make it a movie that could just as easily have been set in the Mumbai underworld rather than Karachi. The geopolitics and right-nationalism appears primarily in the editorializing subplot from the point of view of Indian intelligence, and the use of real terror incidents and plot events rhyming with real ones. The contrast with the bubblegum silliness of the YRF spyverse movies, which studiously avoid any real commentary on India-Pakistan relations, is stark. I think that franchise is dead now.
Though I don’t agree with the implicit politics of the movie, props for the story not insulting the intelligence of the viewer or holding back from getting into intricate local geopolitics that even people who follow the news of the region might be shaky on (like the Baluchistan angle).
Curiously the American right wing seems unable to make movies like this. It ends up being pure myth-making (Yellowstone type franchises) or basic vigilante fantasies (Dirty Harry to American Sniper).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurandhar
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