Rarely has a film set the cat among the pigeons like Aditya Dhar’s Durandhar has done. Its impact has spread far beyond the box office.

Social media seethes with accusations about what the Hindi film industry establishment stands for and whether our eminent Indian film critics should be trusted. And the majority opinion seems to be that the two parties are signatories to a covenant: Stay true to the message that Pakistan is not an enemy country; ISI agents want peace with India.

ISI wanting bonhomie? Yes, that sounds ridiculous. But look at the cinematic evidence.

In Main Hoon Na (2004) starring Shah Rukh Khan, it is revealed at the end that an embittered former Indian soldier has been carrying out terrorist attacks and framing the ISI to instigate an India-Pakistan war.

In Salman Khan’s Tiger trilogy, Khan’s RAW agent and Katrina Kaif’s ISI spy team up to, among other things, to save India and Pakistan from nuclear holocaust.

In Pathaan (2023), renegade RAW agent John Abraham plans to destroy India with a lab-generated virus. RAW warrior Shah Rukh Khan collaborates with Deepika Padukone’s ISI operative to save the nation.

As super-villain Auric Goldfinger told James Bond in Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."

Prominent Indian critics have played along, giving generally positive and sometimes gushing reviews—“The King is back!" and so on. And then comes Dhurandhar, and suddenly the reviewers find themselves as the target of the common moviegoer’s disdain and wrath. This is unprecedented. How can the authority of the judge, jury and executioner, even though self-appointed, be questioned?

Film critics have always considered themselves to be intellectually superior to the rest of us who pay a fortune to buy movie tickets and popcorn and Pepsi. It comes with the job description. They see themselves as the arbiters of taste and aesthetics and what we should watch or avoid. Their verdicts are delivered from Olympian heights, with the great onus of protecting us from… whatever.

Dhurandhar, a gory immersive three-and-a-half-hour-long film has been shocking and delighting audiences. It looks set to be one of the biggest Hindi film hits of the year. But in its depiction of vile creatures from the Karachi underworld and the ISI plotting lethal terrorist attacks on Indian soil, it strayed from—in fact, willfully ignored—Big Bollywood’s unwritten Pakistan rules.

The film critic establishment has not approved. Anupama Chopra, editor of The Hollywood Reporter in India, described Dhurandhar as packed with “too much testosterone," “shrill nationalism," and an “inflammatory anti-Pakistan narrative". She also criticised the film’s use of real terror events—the Kandahar hijacking, the Parliament attack and 26/11, calling the fact-fiction fusion “dangerous and clunky". Sucharita Tyagi, a popular YouTube film reviewer, called the film “hyper-masculine", “jingoistic" and “propaganda".

It’s interesting that in her review of Pathaan, Chopra had approved the film’s “palatable patriotism". The only interpretation possible of this bizarre term is: “OK, it might be borderline........

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