THE COPY-PASTE BLUEPRINT: WHEN “INSPIRATION” BECOMES PLAGIARISM
Bollywood’s revenge thriller obsession just got a new poster child — and surprise, it’s stitched together from Steven Spielberg’s playbook, Quentin Tarantino’s aesthetic, and Ram Gopal Varma’s leftover shots.
Let’s cut through the PR fluff right now. Dhurandhar isn’t “inspired by” Hollywood classics — it’s a Frankenstein’s monster built from their spare parts, slapped with a saffron filter, and sold as “patriotic cinema.”
You walk into the theatre expecting an original revenge thriller about 26/11. What you get? Steven Spielberg’s Munich wearing a kurta.
The premise is almost embarrassingly identical: A covert operative (Hamza, played with all the emotional range of a cardboard cutout) vows to hunt down and execute every perpetrator of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. One by one. Across borders. In the shadows. Sound familiar? Because that’s literally the entire plot of Munich, where Eric Bana’s Avner systematically eliminates those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Aditya Dhar didn’t just borrow the core concept. He borrowed the moral ambiguity, the fractured team dynamics, the “are we becoming the monsters we’re hunting?” introspection — all of it. Except Spielberg had Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography and Tony Kushner’s screenplay. Dhar has jump cuts and background score that screams “FEEL SOMETHING.”
And before the Twitter warriors descend: Yes, filmmakers draw inspiration. Tarantino does it. Scorsese does it. But they transform their sources. They add layers. They create something that stands on its own legs. Dhurandhar limps on crutches borrowed from three different hospitals.
The opening sequence alone is a masterclass in “how to recreate Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya without understanding why Satya worked.” Dark alleys. Handheld cameras shaking like they’re having a seizure. Characters mumbling in pseudo-realistic Bambaiya Hindi. It’s gritty for the sake of grit — performance art pretending to be neo-noir.
Then we hit the Tarantino phase. Sudden violence punctuated by Bollywood item numbers that make zero narrative sense. Stylized revenge sequences that look like someone watched Inglourious Basterds on mute and decided “I can do that with half the budget and none of the wit.”
But the Munich DNA? That’s the skeleton holding this whole operation together. The structure, the pacing, the moral quandaries — it’s all there. Spielberg spent 164 minutes building a meditation on vengeance and its cost. Dhar speedruns it in 140 minutes while throwing in a romantic subplot and a Kailash Kher qawwali.
Look, I’m not naive. Bollywood has been lifting from Hollywood since the ’50s. Zanjeer was Death Wish. Ghajini was Memento. Bang Bang was… well, a crime against cinema, but also Knight and Day. The difference? Those films at least attempted disguise. Dhurandhar shows up to the plagiarism party wearing a name tag that says “Hi, I’m Munich But Desi.”
MUNICH (2005) MEETS 26/11: SPIELBERG DIDN’T CONSENT TO THIS
Steven Spielberg made Munich as a post-9/11 meditation on the cycle of violence. It’s melancholic, conflicted, haunted by the ghosts of both victims and executioners. Avner’s team doesn’t celebrate their kills — they’re destroyed by them. The film ends not with triumph but with hollow exhaustion.
Dhurandhar treats the same premise like a victory lap.
Hamza’s mission — eliminate the 26/11 masterminds — follows Spielberg’s blueprint beat for beat. The clandestine meetings with intelligence handlers. The research phase where they study their targets’ routines. The moral debates within the team about whether extrajudicial killings make them heroes or murdians. Even the way teammates start dropping off (through death or desertion) mirrors Munich‘s structure.
But where Spielberg interrogated the ethics, Dhar lionizes them. There’s no ambiguity here. No questioning whether state-sanctioned revenge missions birth more terrorism than they prevent. Hamza is right because he’s Indian. His targets are evil because they’re Pakistani (and let’s be honest, because the film needs a villain). The entire moral complexity that made Munich devastatingly relevant? Stripped away for nationalist fervor.
The Munich DNA is most obvious in the third act. Both films feature a climactic assassination that should feel cathartic but instead feels empty. In Spielberg’s version, Avner realizes he’s become the thing he was fighting against. In Dhar’s version… well, there’s a slow-motion hero walk with a setting sun and a rising background score. I’ll let you guess which approach won awards.
And let’s talk about the visuals. Munich was shot by Janusz Kamiński, the man who gave us Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Every frame is intentional. Dhurandhar copies the European locations, the dimly lit hotel rooms, the sterile safe houses — but it’s all surface. It’s cosplay. The cinematographer watched the reference material but forgot to ask why those choices were made.
The most damning parallel? The female characters. In Munich, Avner’s wife represents normalcy, the life he’s sacrificing for revenge. She challenges him. She’s a moral anchor. In Dhurandhar, Hamza’s love interest exists to (a) provide a melodramatic subplot, (b) get kidnapped so he can save her, and (c) tell him he’s doing the right thing when he doubts himself. She’s a plot device wearing a salwar kameez.
Spielberg consulted historians, former Mossad agents, and Palestinian voices to build Munich. He knew the controversy it would spark. He welcomed it because that’s what art does — it provokes conversation. Dhar consulted… what? The Wikipedia page for 26/11 and a bootleg copy of Munich?
Here’s the kicker: If Dhar had positioned Dhurandhar as “our version of Munich” — an homage, a reimagining — we could have that conversation. But instead, the marketing sold it as “Based on True Events” (which 26/11 obviously was, but Hamza’s revenge mission? Citation needed). They wanted the credibility of originality without doing the original work.
The Munich influence isn’t subtle. It’s not a nod or a wink. It’s wholesale appropriation with a tricolor wrapped around it.
SATYA (1998) CALLED — IT WANTS ITS GRITTY BACK
Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya didn’t invent the Hindi gangster film, but it perfected it. The documentary-style realism. The Bambaiya street language. The sense that you weren’t watching actors but actual criminals who happened to stumble onto a film set. It was revolutionary because it was authentic.
Dhurandhar tries to steal that authenticity like a knockoff handbag from Linking Road.
The first 30 minutes are pure RGV cosplay. Handheld camera work that’s nausea-inducing for no narrative reason. Characters chain-smoking in dingy rooms, having conversations about “the job” in hushed tones. Background score that’s just… silence punctuated by city noise. It’s the aesthetic of grit without the substance.
But here’s what RGV understood that Dhar doesn’t: Grit serves the story. In Satya, the low-fi visuals and naturalistic performances made the violence feel real, the stakes tangible. When Bhiku Mhatre got shot, you felt it because you’d spent two hours living in his world. The style was inseparable from the story.
In Dhurandhar, the grit is a costume. Hamza operates in the Mumbai underworld for exactly one act before jetting off to European capitals for his revenge tour. The Satya aesthetic gets abandoned the moment the real plot kicks in. It’s like watching someone start a sentence in Hindi and finish it in French — jarring and pointless.
And the characters! Satya gave us Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj Bajpayee’s career-defining role), Kallu Mama, and the entire criminal ecosystem of Mumbai. They felt lived-in. Dhar gives us… names. Hamza’s crew are functional placeholders who exist to deliver exposition and occasionally die dramatically.
The dialogue is especially painful. RGV’s criminals spoke like criminals — coded language, regional slang, sentences that trailed off because real people don’t deliver perfectly structured monologues. Dhurandhar‘s “gritty” characters speak in Hindi dubbed from English screenwriting software. “The mission is paramount” said no actual Mumbai operative ever.
There’s a scene early on where Hamza meets his handler in a decrepit chawl. The lighting is harsh, shadows everywhere, the whole RGV package. Except the conversation is about covert ops planning, complete with references to “assets” and “protocols.” It’s Satya aesthetics applied to a Jason Bourne plot. It doesn’t work because it doesn’t make sense.
Look, I get it. Every crime thriller made in India post-1998 owes something to Satya. It changed the game. But there’s a difference between influence and imitation. Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur was influenced by Satya — you can feel RGV’s fingerprints. But Kashyap built something new, expanded the canvas, told a multi-generational epic that transcended its inspiration.
Dhar just wants the cool factor without earning it. He wants audiences to think “This is raw, this is real” without doing the work to make it actually raw or real. It’s the cinematic equivalent of buying distressed jeans — pre-faded by factory workers so you can pretend you lived in them.
The most frustrating part? There are glimpses of genuine talent here. A few scenes in that first act — before the film abandons the Satya homage for its Munich core — actually work. The tension is real, the performances grounded. But then Dhar seems to remember he’s making a pan-India revenge thriller and cranks the melodrama to eleven.
Satya ended with ambiguity. Was Satya a victim of circumstance or a willing participant in violence? RGV left it unanswered because life doesn’t provide neat conclusions. Dhurandhar ends with a hero shot and a voice-over about duty and sacrifice. Ram Gopal Varma is somewhere drinking coffee and laughing.
TARANTINO’S INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS GETS THE DISCOUNT TREATMENT
Quentin Tarantino makes revenge fantasies that are simultaneously absurd and deeply serious. Inglourious Basterds is pulp fiction about Nazi-hunting soldiers — but it’s also a dissertation on cinema, propaganda, and the power of image. Tarantino earns his stylistic excess because every frame is deliberate, every needle drop purposeful.
Dhurandhar saw the Nazi-hunting and thought “We can do that with terrorists” without understanding what made Tarantino’s version work.
The influence is obvious in the revenge set-pieces. Each kill in Basterds is a mini-movie — tension built through dialogue, released through sudden violence, underscored by anachronistic music that somehow fits. Dhar tries to recreate this formula with Hamza’s assassination missions. The problem? Tarantino is a master of tension and Dhar is… not.
Take the opening scene of Basterds — the farmhouse interrogation with Hans Landa. It’s 20 minutes of conversation, mostly in French, with zero action. But you can’t breathe because Tarantino builds dread through language, performance, and framing. By the time violence erupts, it’s cathartic.
Dhar’s equivalent scenes are… guys in rooms talking about the plan, then executing the plan, then escaping. There’s no cat-and-mouse. No psychological warfare. Just functional thriller mechanics dressed up with slow-motion and color grading.
And the stylization! Tarantino’s violence is cartoonish because it’s supposed to be — it’s a revenge fantasy, not a documentary. The scalping, the baseball bat, the theater massacre — all deliberately over-the-top to remind you this is cinema, not reality. Dhurandhar wants to be stylized and realistic, which is like trying to make orange juice and coffee in the same glass.
The music choices are especially telling. Tarantino uses David Bowie’s “Cat People” over a Nazi strangling and it’s perfect because the contrast is the point. Dhar uses generic thriller strings that sound like every other Bollywood action film from the past decade. When he does use songs, they’re obligatory romantic numbers that kill momentum.
There’s a sequence where Hamza’s team storms a compound in Karachi (allegedly — could be any brown-people city based on the stock footage). It’s clearly meant to echo the Basterds’ operations behind enemy lines. But Tarantino’s squad had personality — each Basterd was distinct, memorable, quotable. Hamza’s team? I couldn’t tell you three of their names if you paid me.
The biggest sin is the lack of subversion. Inglourious Basterds is a revenge fantasy where the Jews kill Hitler in a movie theater — a meta-commentary on cinema’s power to rewrite history. It’s ridiculous and profound simultaneously. Dhurandhar is just… revenge. Hamza kills bad guys because they’re bad. There’s no layer underneath, no commentary on the nature of vigilante justice or the futility of violence.
Tarantino also understands pacing. Basterds takes its time, lets scenes breathe, trusts the audience to stay engaged through dialogue-heavy sequences. Dhar is terrified of boring people, so he rushes through character development to get to the next set-piece. The result? Action scenes that should feel earned feel perfunctory.
And the ending. Oh, the ending. Basterds concludes with Landa’s swastika carving — a moment of dark comedy that encapsulates the entire film’s tone. Dhurandhar ends with Hamza looking at the sunset while inspirational music swells. Tarantino would be physically ill.
Here’s the thing: If you’re going to steal from Tarantino, at least steal the right lessons. Don’t just copy the aesthetic — understand why he makes those choices. The violence, the music, the structure — it’s all in service of theme. Dhar photocopied the surface without decoding the substance.
WHY BOLLYWOOD CAN’T STOP STEALING (AND WHY WE KEEP WATCHING)
Let’s address the elephant in the multiplex: Bollywood has a plagiarism problem so chronic it’s practically a business model.
It’s not new. In the ’70s and ’80s, we remade Hollywood and Italian films wholesale. Sholay is The Magnificent Seven meets spaghetti westerns. Don is lifted from American crime capers. Dostana (the 1980 one) is basically a Hindi remake of every buddy-cop film ever made. But back then, international cinema wasn’t widely available. Most audiences had never seen the originals. Filmmakers could get away with it.
In 2025, we have streaming. We have IMDb. We have Film Twitter ready to catalog every stolen shot. And yet Bollywood keeps doing it.
Why? Because it’s easier than originality. Because producers believe Indian audiences won’t watch “foreign” plots unless they’re desi-fied. our film industry fundamentally doesn’t respect writing — it’s seen as the disposable part of filmmaking, not the foundation.
