Dhamaal 4
Table of Contents
Quick Facts
Plot
Nineteen years after the first Dhamaal, the franchise returns to what it does best: greedy men chasing a fortune they do not deserve. Dhamaal 4, directed by Indra Kumar, sends Ajay Devgn’s Guddu and the familiar gang — Adi, Manav, Lallan and Johnny — after a hidden treasure, with rival groups, pirates and wild terrain standing between them and the gold. The film is a standalone sequel: no homework from the earlier films is required, only a tolerance for chaos.
The treasure hunt takes the gang from one set piece to the next — cliffs, animals, storms, double-crosses and comic misunderstandings — as each group tries to out-greed the others. Ravi Kishan joins as a pirate villain, while Sanjay Mishra, Esha Gupta, Sanjeeda Sheikh, Anjali Anand and Upendra Limaye fill out the supporting chaos. The plot is deliberately thin; the film knows it, and treats the plot as a clothesline on which to hang gags.
Performance
The core quartet is the reason the franchise still works. Ajay Devgn plays Guddu with dependable, straight-faced calm, letting the madness happen around him, while Riteish Deshmukh’s loud, greedy Lallan remains the film’s loudest laugh generator. Arshad Warsi and Jaaved Jaaferi, as Adi and Manav, have the franchise’s most reliable chemistry — two men finishing each other’s cons as easily as each other’s sentences — and their scenes together are the film’s best.
Sanjay Mishra’s comic timing rescues several stretches where the writing runs thin, and Ravi Kishan throws himself into the villain’s role with gusto. Esha Gupta and Sanjeeda Sheikh are given less to do than the men, which is a familiar franchise weakness, but the ensemble’s comfort with each other is genuine. These actors have been doing this for years, and it shows in the easy rhythm of their scenes.
Screenplay and Direction
Indra Kumar has directed every Dhamaal film, and he directs this one like a man who knows his audience’s order by heart: a big opening gag, a chase, a misunderstanding, a bigger chase. The film’s scale is its largest yet — the trailer launch at Imagicaa, with its giant poster and live treasure hunt, promised spectacle, and the film delivers set pieces with real production value. The screenplay, by Paritosh Painter, Balvinder Singh Suri, Vedd Prakash and Bunty Rathore, keeps the jokes coming at a pace that papers over the thin story.
The cost of that pace is repetition. Many jokes are variations on jokes the franchise has told before, and some land while others stretch past their punchline. At two hours and twenty-three minutes, the film is longer than its material comfortably supports, and the second half sags before the climax rescues it. Yet as pure family entertainment, it mostly does its job: children laugh, adults recognise the old rhythms, and nobody is asked to think too hard.
Music
The Dhamaal films have always lived partly on their music, and this one is no exception. Tanishk Bagchi, Guru Randhawa, Aditya Dev and a team of composers supply the songs, with Amar Mohile on background score, and the Bhojpuri-flavoured track Chatni became the film’s most talked-about number before release. The songs are designed as celebrations — loud, colourful and easy to dance to — and they break up the treasure hunt at exactly the moments the audience needs a breather.
The score keeps the adventure moving without getting in the way of the dialogue, which matters in a comedy where timing is everything. None of the songs will outlive the film the way the original’s music did, but they do their job in the theatre, and the Chatni sequence in particular is staged with real energy.
Themes
Dhamaal 4 is, at heart, a film about greed played for laughs — a theme the franchise has mined since 2007. Every character wants the treasure, nobody deserves it, and the comedy comes from watching decent-ish people behave badly for money. The film never pretends otherwise, and that honesty is part of its charm: it is a morality tale in which the moral is that greed is funny until it is not, and then it is funny again.
There is also a quieter theme underneath: friendship as the only treasure anyone actually keeps. Guddu, Adi, Manav and Lallan betray each other constantly and forgive each other instantly, and the film’s ending — like every Dhamaal ending — rests on that bond. It is not deep, but it is why audiences keep coming back to these characters.
Conclusion
Dhamaal 4 became a commercial success, collecting over ₹224 crore worldwide against its big budget, and it earned that success by giving its audience exactly what the title promised. Released on 10 July 2026 and streaming on Netflix from September, it is the franchise’s loudest, largest outing yet.
It will not convert anyone who disliked the earlier films, and its jokes will divide viewers as they always have. But for a family audience wanting two hours of undemanding, familiar fun, this is a safe and often genuinely funny bet — a reminder that some franchises survive because they know exactly what they are.