The Rehman Treatment of Iqbal: A Lazy Inheritance On how Dhurandhar's most dangerous villain was given someone else's arc and why it didn't work.

There is a moment in the first half of Dhurandhar that contains more menace than anything the second half does with Iqbal. Rehman is mid-monologue — warning, positioning, performing the grammar of a man who has just discovered power. And across the frame, barely noticed, Iqbal smiles. Not broadly. Not theatrically. Just the faint, almost involuntary curl of someone watching a child play with a loaded gun, certain it will not go off. In that single, unscripted-feeling smirk, the film tells us exactly who Iqbal is: a man who has seen this all before, who finds Rehman's self-narration slightly embarrassing, and who is in absolutely no danger of being surprised.

Then Part 2 dismantles all of that.

What the second half does to Iqbal is a kind of structural plagiarism of the film's own first act. Rehman's arc was built on a specific architecture: the humanizing domestic detail (his love for his wife and sons), the act of patricide as proof of capacity, and the soft corner that asks us to hold sympathy alongside our fear. It worked for Rehman because he was the film's central antagonist — the one the audience needed to understand at the level of feeling, not just mechanics. The film spent real estate on him. We earned the complexity.

"Iqbal gets the same architecture at a fraction of the runtime. The result is not complexity — it is formula wearing complexity's clothes."

The patricide in Iqbal's arc mirrors Rehman's matricide almost point for point. The disabled daughter serves the same humanizing function as Rehman's wife and sons — she is the soft corner that is supposed to survive in us after the villain is gone. And Ranveer's character is meant to dispatch Iqbal before the final act, so the film cannot even use time to justify the emotional depth it is asking for. Iqbal kills his father. We see it. We are shown the insults first, the provocation, the scene-setting. And it lands as explanation rather than revelation — because an Iqbal who needs to explain himself is not the Iqbal who smirked at Rehman in Part 1.

The smirk was the whole character. It said: this man does not need to justify his power to anyone. He was not supposed to be seen in rooms where his father was insulting him. The scene of degradation, meant to contextualize his violence, actually diminishes it — because it gives Iqbal a motive, and a villain this composed should not run on motive. He should run on something colder and more self-sufficient.

Even the parrot — placed in Iqbal's home with what feels like intention — goes nowhere. In the grammar of crime cinema, animals in a villain's private space are rarely incidental. The parrot, which hears and repeats, could have been one of the film's most quietly sinister details. Imagine it echoing a phrase from Rehman's own warning monologue — a fragment, out of context, in Iqbal's drawing room. The implication would be devastating: Iqbal has been listening all along, filing everything, finding it mildly amusing. Instead, the parrot is set dressing. It sits. It does not speak to us.

What could have been done differently? Quite a lot — but the answer was probably simpler than the film thought. Iqbal did not need humanization. He needed specificity. The Rehman treatment was lazy not because it reached for depth, but because it reached for the same depth, from the same drawer, using the same tools. That is not complexity. That is replication.

The deeper structural problem is that Dhurandhar seems to assume that villain depth = domestic vulnerability. But that's one model, and it was already spent on Rehman. Iqbal's most interesting quality — that composed, slightly bored awareness of power — is precisely what domesticating him destroys. The moment you show him absorbing his father's insults, he becomes reactive. And a reactive Iqbal is just a plot device.

The parrot thing genuinely frustrates me as a missed opportunity. It has Chekhov's Gun written all over it and the film left it loaded on the wall.

Also worth thinking about: the smirk in Part 1 works because it's free information — it costs the film nothing and tells us everything. The patricide scene costs the film a great deal (runtime, emotional bandwidth, dramatic real estate) and tells us considerably less. That's the inverse of good economy.