7 Stylish Action Films of Bollywood

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Lakshya (2004)

Farhan Akhtar captured the epic nature of war in the Himalayas with grim and grit in this coming-of-age story set against the 1999 Kargil War.

Dhoom (2004)

Yash Raj Films shocked the audience and the industry with a film about thieves on fast bikes, cops on fast bikes, and women interested in fast bikes, starring Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham, and Uday Chopra.

Don 2 (2011)

Farhan Akhtar borrowed oodles from Brian DePalma for the sequel to Don (2006) but also absorbed the slickness of action filmmaking from other Western filmmakers, and married it with the suave anti-hero played by Shah Rukh Khan.

Agneepath (2012)

Karan Malhotra's remake of the 1990 Mukul S. Anand film was as colourfully violent and masalafied as a Bollywood film can be.

Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)

Anurag Kashyap went back to basics and then dialled them up well past the maximum to deliver rooted but stylised set pieces of very desi action involving crude knives and cruder kattas.

Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (2018)

Vasan Bala and Jay I. Patel lent the urban Mumbai landscape a sense of scale with this martial arts comedy film starring Abhimanyu Dassani, Radhika Madan, Mahesh Manjrekar, and two Gulshan Devaiahs. The action, a lot of it owed to East Asian cinema, was truly one of a kind.

Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019)

Aditya Dhar's recreation of the 2016 cross-border surgical strikes was a step in a different direction with its grounded but stylised action and precise imagery.

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