Dhruva Review: Arvind Swamy Steals a Film Built For Ram Charan

Yes, Dhruva is worth watching, and the reason is Arvind Swamy. The Telugu action thriller pairs him with Ram Charan across a cat-and-mouse chase that runs on a taut script and one villain who keeps arriving before you are ready for him. The songs break the tension, the dubbing works against the hero, and the film earns its rating on the strength of two performances. Our rating is 7 out of 10.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it for the villain. A 165-minute Telugu action thriller with Ram Charan as ASP Dhruva, Rakul Preet Singh as the forensic expert Ishika, and Arvind Swamy as the scientist they are hunting. Rotten Tomatoes has no score for the film yet. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Dhruva is about

Twenty years before the film starts, the son of a low-level party worker watches the party leader murder a rebel, takes the blame for it and goes to juvenile prison, and that blame wins his father an assembly seat. By 2016 that son is Dr. Siddharth Abhimanyu (Arvind Swamy), a Padma Shri-winning scientist who runs illegal medical operations for the pharmaceutical companies that lobby his father, a minister in the minority government, whose own party leader has become chief minister of the state.

Against him is ASP Dhruva (Ram Charan), a trainee officer with a talent for finding the one man behind a network of kidnappings, and Dr. Ishika (Rakul Preet Singh), the forensic expert who bails him out of trouble and then keeps being the person who knows too much. The remake rights of the Tamil original Thani Oruvan, made and written by Mohan Raja, were bought for 5.5 crore rupees, and Surender Reddy wrote the Telugu adaptation, with new scenes and new characters, though the score is again by Hiphop Tamizha.

Cast and performances

Swamy plays Siddharth Abhimanyu as a man who has never had to raise his voice, because the money is on his side, and the performance never raises its voice either. Sangeethha Devi Dundoo at The Hindu was not the only critic to notice what he does with the part: "Arvind Swamy aces his role and makes Siddharth Abhimanyu the most impactful character in the film." IBTimes India's Shekhar Hooli, who gave the film three and a half stars, put the same point in his round-up of critical verdicts: "Dhruva is a must-watch movie for its intelligent and thrilling screenplay, brilliant performance by Ram Charan and Aravind Swamy and superb production values."

Ram Charan plays Dhruva with a permanently coiled physicality that works even when the dubbing works against him. The AP Herald's reviewer wrote that "Ram Charan's acting as an IPS officer has enacted phenomenally and has proved his individuality", which is a generous reading of a film in which the hero's voice is frequently the weakest thing in the frame.

Rakul Preet Singh gets the least to do, and Dundoo saw it exactly: "Rakul Preet is charming, but you wish she had a better role." Navdeep plays the friend who dies, and Posani Krishna Murali plays the minister who is also the villain's father, with the weary humour of a man who has seen everything and says so.

What works

The screenplay. Srividya Palaparthi at the Times of India gave the film four stars and wrote that "Dhruva promises to be an edge-of-the-seat entertainer and it delivers impeccably", calling it a remake done right. The script sets up the villain before it explains him, keeps the hunter and the hunted on the same board, and lets each of them change shape as the other adapts.

The cat and mouse. Jeevi at Idlebrain, who gave the film three and a half stars and one of its best lines, wrote that "solid story, engaging screenplay and riveting performances make Dhruva an intelligent thriller which is at par with any of Hollywood or Korean films".

The production. Hiphop Tamizha's score, P. S. Vinod's photography, Naveen Nooli's editing and Sri Nagendra Prasad Tangala's production design for Geetha Arts make a police procedural look like an action picture, and the fight sequences are staged for real.

What doesn't

The songs. Three of them stop the story dead, and the film would be sharper with the running time given back to the chase.

The dubbing. The First Post critic, who gave the film three stars in a round-up of critical verdicts, said that "the one thing that is bothersome is the dubbing". Charan's voice is the film's most obvious problem and the one nobody in the business was going to fix.

The hero's interior life. Dhruva spends most of the film being relentless, and the script has little use for doubt. 123 Telugu's reviewer was generous about the result anyway, calling Swamy "the surprise package of the film".

What audiences say

All figures checked on October 22, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes has no Tomatometer score and no critic reviews for Dhruva yet, and no Popcornmeter figure, and the Dhruva page on Rotten Tomatoes belongs to the 2002 Kannada film of the same name, not this one. Metacritic has no page for the film. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 3.42 from 6,156 ratings, with 9,902 members having watched it and 1,630 liking it, and the film sitting in 765 member lists. TMDB has it at 6.7 from 46 votes. We do not quote IMDb here, because the site blocks our checks.

The critical picture is better than the aggregate picture, because the film has no aggregate picture in English. IBTimes India gathered the Telugu verdicts in December 2016: three and a half stars from IBTimes India, three and a half from 123 Telugu, three and a half from Idlebrain, three and a quarter from Sify, and three each from First Post and AP Herald. Outside that round-up, the Times of India gave it four stars and the Hindustan Times two. Nobody scored it zero, and nobody called it unremarkable.

Where to watch Dhruva

JustWatch's listings, read on October 22, 2026, show Dhruva in the United States streaming on Sun Nxt, and as a rental or a purchase on Amazon Video. There is no free tier, and Sun Nxt is the only subscription route, so a viewer without it is left with a rental. The certificate is UA. On runtime, the sources differ by a few minutes: the Times of India's reviewer counted the running time at two hours forty, while JustWatch, Letterboxd and TMDB all list 165 minutes, which is the figure we use.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Dhruva streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Dhruva worth watching? Yes, for the chase and for Arvind Swamy, who takes a supporting part and turns the film into his. Srividya Palaparthi's four stars are for a remake that understands what it is remaking, and the First Post critic's three are for the dubbing, which is a real fault. Our 7 out of 10 sits between them, with a word of advice: watch it with the sound on and the songs muted if you can.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Dhruva

Siddharth has a chip put into Dhruva's chest during surgery and can hear everything Dhruva says, so the two of them perform a deception, and Siddharth takes the bait. Dhruva takes Abbas, the man with the evidence against him, and has him recorded, then drugs him and lets Siddharth's own men do the killing. The police chief is pushed into faking a stroke, which gives the ruling party twenty-four hours to decide whether to let him go, and Dhruva gets the chief's permission to make the arrest.

He takes Siddharth at his father's state funeral, and the villain is tricked into a confession. Two of the film's surprises come out at once: the health minister who was supposed to be dead survived, saved by Dhruva's team, and the funeral the state attended was the funeral of Gautham, the friend killed for carrying the evidence. The medicine that started the case is released as a generic, and the patent for it belongs to Dr. Akshara, the scientist Siddharth had murdered for refusing to keep quiet.

Dhruva then makes a deal and lets Siddharth live in exchange for the names of his associates, handing him a bulletproof vest so that he can fake his own death in transport. The people who arrange that murder are waiting for him anyway. Dhruva attacks the man sent to kill him and finds that Siddharth is not wearing the vest, and Preethi puts a bullet into the scientist. Dying, Siddharth says the evidence is on a card inside the vest he never put on.