The Nostalgia Verdict: Why Critics Are Split on Border 2 and Dhurandhar
There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being born into cinema royalty — the shadow is enormous, the expectations suffocating, and the margin for failure almost nonexistent. Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dutt both grew up in that shadow, both stepped out from under it with early-80s debuts, and both spent the next four decades carving careers so wildly different in texture and temperament that comparing them requires more than a spreadsheet of hits and flops. It demands an honest conversation about what we want from our screen heroes — and more tellingly, what we forgive them for.
Sunny, born Ajay Singh Deol, is the eldest son of Dharmendra, one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved action stars. Sanjay Dutt carries perhaps the weightiest legacy in all of Bollywood — son of Sunil Dutt, the conscience of Indian cinema, and Nargis, arguably its most transcendent actress. Where Sunny inherited muscle and nationalist fire, Sanjay inherited mythology. And yet both men, when stripped of their surnames, turned out to be singular forces who bent entire decades of Hindi filmmaking toward their personalities.
Sunny stepped in with Betaab in 1983 and immediately established himself as something fresh — a romantic lead with barely contained physical energy, a boy-next-door quality that his father never quite had. Sanjay was two years ahead of him, debuting in Rocky in 1981 under his own father’s direction, a launch clouded by a grief so profound it shadows the film’s success even today. Nargis died of cancer just weeks before Rocky released. Sanjay Dutt walked into the lights of premiere night having just buried his mother. That the film worked at all is a testament to something raw and unresolvable in him — a quality that would define his entire career in ways no acting coach could manufacture.
What makes this comparison compelling in 2026 is not nostalgia, though there is plenty of that. It is the startling fact that both men are still here, still relevant, still pulling audiences into theatres. Border 2 just wrapped its theatrical run with a net India collection of over ₹329 crore, making it Sunny Deol’s second film after Gadar 2 to cross ₹300 crore domestically. Sanjay Dutt, meanwhile, is in the thick of the Dhurandhar franchise alongside Ranveer Singh, playing a villain with the kind of coiled menace that only someone who has actually lived a complicated life can fully inhabit. Two men, both past 60, both still moving the needle. The question worth asking is not who was bigger — it is who was more interesting, and whether those two things are ever actually the same.
Born Into Cinema, Not Chosen By It
The weight of legacy functions differently depending on what kind of legacy you inherit. Dharmendra, Sunny’s father, was the action-romance hero of the 1960s and 70s — beloved, consistent, commercially dominant, but never particularly complicated. His was a cinema of physicality and charm. Sunny did not simply replicate that blueprint; he distorted it. Where Dharmendra was warm and approachable, Sunny came across as coiled, volcanic, almost anti-social in his intensity. There was no inherited ease, no smooth transition from father to son. He had to find his own frequency.
Sanjay’s inheritance was, by any measure, heavier. Sunil Dutt was not merely an actor but a social force — a man who walked through the violence of the 1984 Sikh riots carrying an olive branch and meaning it. Nargis was the woman who made Mother India, one of Hindi cinema’s most enduring monuments. To be the son of both was to carry the weight of Indian cinema’s moral ambition on your back. It perhaps explains why Sanjay’s life, more than his films, became the story everyone wanted to tell — why an entire Rajkumar Hirani biopic was devoted to unpacking not his hits but his havoc.
Sunny, by contrast, kept his personal life almost aggressively private. No tabloid revelations, no addiction confessions, no courtroom drama. Just a man who showed up to sets, punched through wooden planks on screen, and went home to Punjab in his heart if not always in geography. The contrast between their off-screen lives is perhaps the most revealing thing about both of them.
The Decade That Defined Them
The 1980s were unkind to subtlety. Bollywood wanted spectacle, vengeance, and moral clarity, and both Sunny and Sanjay delivered — in entirely different registers. Sunny found his footing through Arjun (1985), playing the voice of India’s frustrated youth, a character seething against injustice with a physicality that felt like a controlled explosion. By Tridev (1989), he had locked himself in as one of the decade’s bankable names, though he had not yet found the film that would truly transform him from star to phenomenon.
Sanjay’s 80s peak was Naam (1986), a film that demonstrated something Sunny did not traffic in at the time — emotional depth layered inside an action narrative. Naam showed that Sanjay could be broken on screen, that vulnerability was not weakness but a different kind of strength. He followed it with Hathyar, further cementing the rebel image. Yet even as the films were working, the personal life was fracturing. Drug dependency, erratic behavior, the beginning of the contradictions that would eventually define him as much as any screenplay ever could.
If the 80s were a proving ground, both men passed their tests — but through entirely different examinations. Sunny proved he could carry a film on physical conviction alone. Sanjay proved he could make an audience feel something uncomfortable for a character who was not entirely clean.
The Films That Changed Everything
Every career has that one seismic moment — the film that cleaves existence into before and after. For Sunny Deol, there were actually two of them, separated by a decade, and each more surprising than the last. Ghayal (1990) arrived when Sunny had everything to prove and chose to produce the film himself after no one would fund it. Director Rajkumar Santoshi’s debut became the year’s biggest hit, winning seven Filmfare Awards and earning Sunny his first National Award. The film demonstrated something the industry had underestimated — that Sunny could anchor a full emotional arc, not just a fight sequence.
Then came Damini (1993), where he played a defense lawyer so righteously furious that the courtroom scene became one of Bollywood’s most quoted theatrical moments. “Tarikh pe tarikh” was not just a line — it was a cultural artifact. He won his second National Award for it. Then in 2001, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha shattered every box-office record of its era and turned “Dhai Kilo Ka Haath” into a phrase that Hindi-speaking India still invokes in casual conversation. It was the highest-grossing Bollywood film of its time.
Sanjay’s transformation was more diffuse and, in some ways, more profound. Vaastav (1999) was the turning point — a film where he played a gangster’s descent with such unsettling honesty that it felt autobiographical even though it was fiction. Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (2003) then did something almost no actor manages: it completely reinvented his public image through comedy, warmth, and the kind of dumb-but-lovable charm that won over audiences who had previously found him intimidating. The Munna Bhai films did not just give Sanjay a hit; they gave him affection. They transformed Bollywood’s bad boy into the country’s favorite bhaijaan — years before that term migrated elsewhere.
Public Persona vs. What the Camera Sees
The screen persona and the lived reality rarely match in Bollywood, but with these two, the gap between image and truth operates in fascinating directions. Sunny has always projected uncomplicated nationalism — the man who brings down the hand pump in Gadar, who tears apart fences, who weeps for the motherland. His politics eventually became literal: he served as a Member of Parliament from Gurdaspur. The patriotism was not performance; it was constitutive. What you see in the films is, to a remarkable degree, what the man actually believes.
Sanjay’s screen image and real life were instead a collision. He played heroes who were dangerous and villains who were sympathetic, often because his own biography did not fit neatly into either category. The arms case connected to the 1993 Mumbai blasts was the defining rupture of his public existence — arrested under TADA, eventually acquitted of terrorist charges by the court which noted he was not a terrorist, then convicted under the Arms Act and sentenced to five years. He served prison time. He came back. He then gave some of the most assured performances of his career in Agneepath (2012) as a villain of operatic menace and in multiple subsequent roles where the darkness no longer needed to be manufactured.
There is something almost operatic about Sanjay’s life story — the kind of material that, in another culture, would become a ten-part prestige television series. Hirani made it a film. Sanjay survived it and kept working. Sunny, meanwhile, quietly went to Parliament and came back to make Gadar 2.
Strengths, Limitations, and the Question of Range
Sunny Deol’s great strength is also his great limitation: he is irrevocably himself on screen. He cannot disappear into a character the way a Naseeruddin Shah or a Nawazuddin Siddiqui might. You always know it is Sunny — the jaw set, the vein at the temple, the voice that drops into a register that suggests barely suppressed seismic activity. That consistency becomes genius in the right film and a straitjacket in the wrong one. His romantic films rarely had the same electricity as his action outings. His comedies worked when they leaned into the Deol self-awareness (Yamla Pagla Deewana being the best example) and fell flat when they tried to position him as someone lightfooted.
Sanjay’s range is genuinely broader, which makes his career both more interesting and, paradoxically, more uneven. He could do Munna Bhai‘s tenderness and Agneepath‘s menace within the same decade. He could play romantic leads, comedic sidekicks, and philosophical gangsters with equal conviction. The limitation was not range but reliability — personal turmoil meant that his filmography has gaps and misfires that a more disciplined career might have avoided. When Sanjay was fully present in a film, the results were extraordinary. When he was not — and there were stretches — the films suffered visibly.
Awards, Records, and What Numbers Actually Tell You
Awards tend to remember one kind of excellence and forget another. Sunny Deol holds two National Film Awards — for Ghayal and Damini — a distinction that places him among the genuinely honored performers in Hindi cinema’s formal hierarchy. His commercial record is equally formidable: Gadar and Gadar 2 both set records for their respective eras, and Border 2 in 2026 crossed ₹329 crore net in India with a worldwide gross approaching ₹484 crore on a reported budget of ₹275 crore. That is not a fluke; that is a franchise with genuine cultural staying power.
Sanjay’s award recognition is distributed differently — two Filmfare Awards and three Screen Awards, but his most significant performances (Vaastav, Agneepath) are often cited in critical discussions in ways that formal recognition does not fully capture. His commercial highs, from Khalnayak to the Munna Bhai films to Agneepath, were massive but have not produced the sequel-era resurgence that Sunny now enjoys. His current engagement with the Dhurandhar franchise, however, suggests he is not content with legacy roles — he is still building.
Cultural Impact: Who Moved the Industry?
This is where the debate gets genuinely difficult, because both men influenced Bollywood in structural ways that go beyond box-office numbers. Sunny Deol essentially codified the post-Amitabh Bachchan action hero — a man driven not by systemic anger at class and injustice but by intensely personal patriotic and familial loyalty. He gave that archetype its grammar. The hand pump scene, the courtroom scene, the village square showdowns — these became templates that dozens of subsequent films borrowed and diluted. His influence on the iconography of Hindi action cinema is not acknowledged loudly enough, perhaps because it is so thoroughly absorbed.
Sanjay’s cultural impact operated on a different frequency. The Munna Bhai films changed what audiences expected comedy to look like in a Bollywood blockbuster. Vaastav raised the bar on what a mainstream star could do with morally compromised characters. And the sheer, strange, operatic quality of his own life story — the addictions, the arms case, the prison terms, the resurrections — became a kind of cultural parable about what it means to fall from grace and choose to return. He did not just influence films; he influenced the stories Bollywood tells about itself.
Fan Connection: Loyalty vs. Love
Sunny Deol’s fan base is, in many ways, a constituency — geographically concentrated in Punjab and the Hindi heartland, politically inflected, multigenerational in the sense that fathers and sons watch Gadar together not as nostalgia but as identity. The loyalty is structural. It is the loyalty you give to someone who has never betrayed you, whose screen politics align with your own, whose fists come down on the right enemies every time. Border 2 performing well in 2026 is not a surprise if you understand that fan base — it is not trending crowds but returning devotees.
Sanjay’s fans carry something more complicated in their chests. They love him because he is imperfect, because he fell and came back, because there is a Munna Bhai warmth coexisting with a known darkness that makes him feel human in ways that more careful stars do not. “Sanju Baba” is an affectionate diminutive that no one uses for a man they merely admire from a distance. They use it for someone they feel proprietary about, someone they want to protect even from himself. That relationship is rare, and it has outlasted every controversy.
The 2026 Reckoning
Standing in 2026, both men look improbably vital. Sunny at 68 just headlined one of the year’s biggest commercial events — Border 2 opened to ₹59 crore on Republic Day alone and sustained itself across six weeks, a rare achievement in an era of weekend-heavy theatrical patterns. Sanjay, at 66, is playing the villain in a franchise that belongs to Ranveer Singh’s generation, but his presence in Dhurandhar and its sequel is not decorative — it is structural. He is not there for nostalgia; he is there because the part demands exactly the kind of lived-in intensity that only a career as complicated as his can produce.
What is it that separates these two careers at their core? Perhaps it is the difference between a man who built an unassailable identity and a man who built an unforgettable mythology. Sunny Deol is consistency — the same fire, the same convictions, the same physical grammar across four decades, and an audience that trusts him for exactly that. Sanjay Dutt is accumulation — every film, every prison stint, every resurrection adding another layer to a public persona so dense and contradictory that it has become its own kind of art.
Whether you prefer the clarity of one or the chaos of the other probably says more about you than it does about them. Cinema has room for both the man who never breaks and the man who breaks spectacularly and reassembles himself in public. In fact, Hindi cinema would be considerably poorer without either one — because between them, they covered nearly every story the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s wanted to tell about what a man is, what a hero costs, and what survival actually looks like on a fifty-foot screen.
The critical reception of both films reads like a Rorschach test for what modern Bollywood audiences actually want. Border 2 opened on Republic Day 2026 and immediately divided critics into two honest camps — those who found its patriotic sweep emotionally earned, and those who found it emotionally manipulative. Firstpost was blunt: the film “thrives on pure nostalgia; that’s it”. Hollywood Reporter India called it “predictably loud and combative, relying on familiar rhetoric while refusing to break fresh cinematic ground”. On the other side, Hindustan Times praised it as “a nostalgic cinematic experience” with strong performances particularly from Sunny Deol, while the Indian Express acknowledged that it “holds on to the soul and spirit of the original, while giving us a much bigger canvas — showing conflict not just on land and air, but also water”.
The second half is where even sympathetic critics grew restless. Hindustan Times noted that “while the idea of exploring the war through the lens of all three uniformed services is genuinely novel, the execution of the war itself is average at best” — the budget and VFX were spent on expanding scale, but “there is simply too much of it”. This is the central critical tension: Border 2 excels at emotional memory and stumbles at cinematic originality. It is a film that works as feeling and falters as filmmaking.
Dhurandhar (2025) drew a different kind of critical ambivalence. The Hollywood Reporter India wrote that “by these parameters alone, Dhurandhar is not a great film”, while more enthusiastic reviewers praised the world-building around Lyari and its incredible production design. Sanjay Dutt’s villain role was noted as the film’s sinister anchor, though the Hollywood Reporter India observed that the film ultimately loses its grip on its own genre identity. Where Border 2 was faulted for being too familiar, Dhurandhar was faulted for being too chaotic in its ambitions. Both films, in other words, hit a different version of the same nostalgia problem — one recycled a formula, the other tried so hard to escape formula that it lost its bearings.
The 90s Action Rivalry: Box Office by Box Office
The 1990s were Sunny Deol’s decade in a way that was difficult to contest at the time. Six of his films in that decade collectively earned over ₹202 crore at the box office — a staggering figure for the era. Ghayal (1990) earned ₹20 crore, Damini (1993) collected ₹11 crore, Ghatak (1996) earned ₹84 crore, Border (1997) pulled ₹39 crore, Ziddi (1997) earned ₹29.25 crore, and Salaakhen (1998) added ₹18.58 crore. The sheer density of that run — no major gaps, no catastrophic misfires, no need to rely on a single franchise — made Sunny the 90s action benchmark that others were measured against.
Sanjay Dutt’s 90s were commercially impressive but more punctuated. Saajan (1991) was one of the decade’s biggest romantic hits, Khalnayak (1993) was a phenomenon as much for its controversy as its collections, and Vaastav (1999) arrived at the decade’s close as one of the finest performances Hindi cinema had ever seen from a mainstream star. But the personal turmoil — arrests, court appearances, the grinding uncertainty of the arms case proceedings — created gaps in his filmography that Sunny simply did not have. When the court process consumed years of Sanjay’s prime career window, Sunny was quietly piling up hits. The rivalry was real, but it was uneven by circumstance as much as by talent.
National Film Awards: A Clear but Nuanced Verdict
This is one of the clearest data points in the entire comparison, and it decisively favors Sunny Deol. He holds two National Film Awards — a Special Jury Award for Ghayal (1991) and the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for Damini (1994). In a career spanning over 35 years and more than 100 films, he also received multiple nominations at Filmfare including Best Actor wins for Ghayal (1991) and Gadar (2002).
Sanjay Dutt, by contrast, has never personally won a National Film Award. Four of his films have received National Awards in other categories — Munna Bhai M.B.B.S., Lage Raho Munna Bhai, and others — but no jury has ever handed him the individual honour in 44 years of cinema. He has won two Filmfare Awards (Best Actor for Vaastav: The Reality in 2000 and Best Comic Actor for Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. in 2004), three Screen Awards, two IIFA Awards, and an assortment of other honours. The aggregate of 25 wins and 62 nominations across his career reflects sustained industry recognition — but the absence of a National Film Award for a performance as shattering as Vaastav remains one of the most glaring oversights in the history of Hindi cinema’s formal awards.
The 2026 Comeback: Numbers and Meaning
The divergence in their recent returns is striking. Border 2 completed its 50-day theatrical run with a worldwide gross of ₹484.81 crore against a reported budget of ₹275 crore — earning ₹362.34 crore net domestically and ₹57.25 crore overseas. Its opening week alone contributed ₹224.25 crore in India, and it became the highest-grossing Indian film of 2026 so far. On commercial terms, it is not a comeback — it is a continuation of the Gadar 2 momentum, a second consecutive proof that Sunny Deol’s particular brand of patriotic action has an audience that does not shrink with time.
Sanjay Dutt’s engagement with the Dhurandhar franchise is structurally different and, in its own way, more ambitious. He is playing a villain in a film built around Ranveer Singh and directed by Aditya Dhar — he is not the centrepiece, he is the dangerous weight that gives the story its gravity. Dhurandhar 2 is confirmed for a 2026 release. The choice to inhabit that kind of supporting-but-essential villain role rather than seeking a star-led vehicle of his own says something deliberate about where he is in his career — and perhaps about how honestly he reads his own capabilities in the current landscape.
What the Critical Divide Actually Reveals
The deeper reason critics are split on whether either film “recaptures 90s magic” is that the question itself is slightly wrongly framed. Neither film is trying to recreate the 90s — they are trying to exploit the emotional residue of the 90s in an era when theatrical cinema desperately needs event films. Border 2 works as an event — its Republic Day placement, its multi-service war scope, its use of original Border (1997) musical motifs — all of it is engineering a feeling rather than telling a story with fresh urgency. Critics who value craft over catharsis mark it down. Critics and audiences who value communal emotional experience mark it up.
Dhurandhar was reviewed more generously by some for at least attempting something tonally and aesthetically different from Bollywood’s safety-first blockbuster template. But the incoherence of its genre identity — spy thriller, crime drama, underworld saga, all running simultaneously — made it a film that tried too hard to be new rather than genuinely succeeding at being new. Sanjay Dutt’s presence as a villain was consistently noted as one of its genuine assets, which perhaps explains why the sequel is already confirmed.
What both films ultimately reveal is that the 90s magic critics keep referencing was never really about action sequences or patriotic anthems. It was about the specific electricity of watching a star commit completely — Sunny to his rage, Sanjay to his contradictions — in a cinema before irony became the default mode of cultural consumption. That electricity is genuinely difficult to replicate not because the stars have aged, but because the audience has. And yet Border 2‘s ₹484 crore worldwide gross suggests that a substantial portion of that audience still wants to sit in the dark and feel ten years old again — which may be the most honest verdict the box office has ever delivered.