Dhaka Attack (2017) Review – The Police Thriller That Modernised Bangladeshi Action Cinema

★★★★☆ Our Rating: 8/10

Every film industry has a before-and-after title — the release after which certain things were suddenly possible. For Bangladesh, Dhaka Attack is one of those titles. Released on 6 October 2017 and widely billed as the country’s first police action thriller, Dipankar Dipon’s film took a genre Hollywood treats as routine — cops, bombs, a city under threat — and proved that a Bangladeshi production, made with the cooperation of the Bangladesh Police itself, could stage it with pace, scale and technical polish that local audiences had simply never seen at home. It went on to win Best Film at the 42nd Bangladesh National Film Awards, and its lead actor took Best Actor. Landmarks are rarely this entertaining.

That said, a landmark is not automatically a masterpiece, and this review will be honest about both halves of that sentence. Dhaka Attack creaks in places — an overstuffed villain plot, songs that stop the manhunt cold, visual effects that have not aged gracefully. But as a piece of popular filmmaking, and as a turning point for Dhallywood, it more than earns its reputation. This Dhaka Attack review covers the story, the performances, the craft and the numbers — without spoiling the hunt for its mastermind.

Quick Facts: Dhaka Attack at a Glance

You will notice there is no budget row in this table. That is deliberate, not an oversight: no reliable, consistently published production budget for Dhaka Attack exists in the sources available — figures that circulate on low-quality databases conflict and are unsourced — so, rather than print a number we cannot stand behind, we omit it and say so here.

The Story: A City, a Bomb Squad and a Killer Playing a Long Game (Spoiler-Free)

Dhaka’s police are put on alert by a pattern that does not look like ordinary crime. A killing at a chemical factory, chemicals stolen, and then an attack aimed at the most horrifying target imaginable — the threat of a bomb around a school — tells the department it is facing an organised enemy with a plan, not a lone criminal. The response brings together the force’s specialists. Abid Rahman (Arifin Shuvoo), head of the bomb disposal unit, is placed at the centre of the operation, working alongside Ashfaq (ABM Sumon), who leads the SWAT element, under senior officers who know the city is watching them work.

Into this machinery steps Chaity (Mahiya Mahi), an investigative journalist who is following the same trail from outside the cordon — and who, inconveniently for protocol, sometimes knows things the police do not. As the investigation connects incidents that first seemed separate, the trail bends toward a single orchestrating mind: a narcotics-linked, psychologically unstable killer with ambitions far beyond one city’s underworld, a man who treats the attacks as moves in a game he fully intends to win.

The structure that follows is the film’s real novelty for its industry: a genuine procedural rhythm of leads, dead ends, surveillance and set-piece operations, intercut with the antagonist’s parallel moves. This review will not name the turns the hunt takes in its final third — suffice to say the film understands the basic contract of the police thriller, which is that competence itself can be suspenseful: watching professionals do a dangerous job well, against a clock, is the show.

Performances: Shuvoo’s Breakthrough, and a Villain Who Steals His Scenes

Arifin Shuvoo as Abid Rahman gives the performance that redefined his career — and the industry noticed, awarding him the National Film Award for Best Actor (shared that year, for films of 2017). His Abid is not a superhero in uniform; he is a specialist, played with coiled patience and physical credibility. Shuvoo trained visibly for the role and carries the bomb-disposal sequences — the film’s signature tension set-pieces — with the stillness they require. It is star acting in the best sense: charisma placed in the service of procedure.

Mahiya Mahi as Chaity brings energy and a useful outsider’s friction to the police world. The journalist-among-cops device is a thriller staple, and Mahi plays it with enough spark that her scenes with Shuvoo have genuine push and pull, even if the script occasionally reduces her function to delivering exposition at convenient moments. ABM Sumon as Ashfaq, the SWAT commander, is the film’s quiet asset — a physical presence whose action scenes carry real weight, and whose professional rapport with Abid gives the operations their believability.

The scene-stealer, for many viewers, is Taskeen Rahman as Zisan, the antagonist — a cold, theatrical, deeply unsettling performance that announced a major screen villain to Bangladeshi cinema. Rahman plays the killer’s intelligence as more frightening than his violence, and the film is at its best when it simply lets his mind games run. Around them, a distinguished supporting bench — Afzal Hossain, Alamgir, Syed Hasan Imam and Shatabdi Wadud — lends the police hierarchy and the city’s establishment a gravitas that grounds the genre machinery in recognisable Bangladeshi reality.

Direction and Technical Craft

Dipankar Dipon directs like a man who has studied the international police procedural closely and is determined to prove its grammar works in Dhaka. The film’s multicamera action coverage — credited to an unusually large cinematography team, reflecting the scale of the operation sequences — gives the raids, chases and disposal set-pieces a sweep that was startling in a 2017 Bangladeshi release. Real police cooperation shows on screen: genuine units, vehicles, locations and drill lend the operations a texture money alone cannot buy, and Dipon is smart enough to film Dhaka itself as a character — its traffic, density and chaos are the terrain the thriller moves through.

Editor Md. Kalam keeps a 147-minute film at procedural pace for long stretches, and the middle act, where investigation and counter-moves interlock, is genuinely propulsive. The craft caveats are real, though. The visual effects, ambitious for their context, were uneven on release and look rougher now. The film’s structure sags where commercial obligations intrude: at 147 minutes it is carrying both a lean thriller and the apparatus of a mainstream Bengali star film, and the two do not always fit in the same frame. And the villain’s master plan, as it is progressively revealed, requires the audience to accept escalating contrivance — the film’s final movement asks for more suspension of disbelief than its grounded first hour trained you to give.

None of this cancels the achievement. Judged against its own industry’s 2017 baseline, Dhaka Attack’s craft was a leap; judged purely as a thriller, it remains a solid, well-built one.

Music and Background Score

The music, credited to a team including Adit, DJ Rahat, Dabbu and Autumnal Moon, with Arindam Chatterjee also associated with the soundtrack in contemporary reporting, is a study in the mainstream Bengali compromise: a thriller score that must also be a song album. As a score, the film works well — percussive, urgent cues drive the operations, and the disposal sequences understand the power of near-silence punctuated by a heartbeat of sound. The album’s most famous footnote is playback history: the film featured a song voiced by Arijit Singh, widely reported as the celebrated singer’s first for a Bangladeshi film, and it became a substantial streaming draw in its own right.

The honest complaint is placement. At least one full song sequence halts a manhunt at the precise moment the tension should be tightening, and the film never quite recovers the minutes it spends there. This was standard commercial practice in Dhallywood in 2017 and audiences of the time expected it; viewers arriving now, raised on streaming-era thrillers, will feel the seams more sharply. The score helps the film more than the songs do — which, for a police thriller, is arguably the right way round.

What Works and What Doesn’t

What we loved:

• A genuine procedural structure — investigation, special units and counter-moves — new to Bangladeshi mainstream cinema
• Arifin Shuvoo’s National Award-winning turn: disciplined, physical and charismatic
• Taskeen Rahman’s Zisan, one of modern Dhallywood’s defining villains
• Real police cooperation giving the operations unmatched local authenticity
• Dhaka itself, filmed as terrain, obstacle and character

What could be better:

• At 147 minutes the film carries a lean thriller and a commercial star package that do not always fit together
• Song placement interrupts the manhunt’s momentum
• Visual effects were uneven in 2017 and have aged poorly
• The master plan’s later reveals lean on contrivance the grounded opening did not prepare you for
• Chaity’s journalism thread is underused relative to its promising setup

Box Office: A Hit, Reported the Bangladeshi Way

The same warning that applies to all Bangladeshi figures applies here, and we print it rather than bury it: these numbers are press- and trade-reported, compiled without independent audit, and should be read as reported claims. On that basis, Dhaka Attack is consistently listed at a total of about ৳9.5 crore (৳95 million), with a reported first week of around ৳7.5 crore — at the time, among the strongest opening weeks a Bangladeshi film had recorded, and a sign of how effectively the film’s marketing and novelty converted curiosity into tickets. International tracked figures tell only a fragment of the story: the film opened in the United States on 20 October 2017 followed by a wider international rollout, and overseas databases capture only a small tracked slice of its earnings, so they should never be quoted as its total.

The honours record is firmer ground, because awards are documented rather than estimated: at the 42nd Bangladesh National Film Awards, honouring the films of 2017, Dhaka Attack won Best Film, Arifin Shuvoo won Best Actor, and the film also took awards including Best Makeup and Best Sound — four national awards in all. For a genre film — in an awards culture worldwide that usually reserves top honours for dramas — that is a significant institutional verdict, and it cemented the film’s status as the moment the Bangladeshi mainstream grew a new genre.

Verdict: Should You Watch It?

Yes — especially if you care about South Asian popular cinema beyond the biggest industries, or if you simply enjoy a competently built police thriller. Come for the historical importance if you like, but you will stay for the disposal sequences, the villain and a lead performance that fully earns its award. Viewers should set expectations honestly: this is a 2017 commercial Dhallywood production, with that era’s songs, length and effects, not a streaming-era minimalist thriller. Judged on its own terms — and on the size of the step it took for its industry — it holds up remarkably well.

Our rating: 8/10 — the landmark Bangladeshi police thriller: imperfect, propulsive and genuinely important, anchored by a star-making lead turn and one great villain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dhaka Attack really the first Bangladeshi police action thriller? That is how it was billed and how it is consistently described in Bangladeshi coverage, and it is fair in substance: earlier Bangladeshi films featured police characters, but Dhaka Attack was the first built entirely as a modern police action thriller, made with formal Bangladesh Police cooperation and organised around special units such as bomb disposal and SWAT.

Did Dhaka Attack win the National Film Award? Yes. At the 42nd Bangladesh National Film Awards for the films of 2017, it won Best Film, Arifin Shuvoo won Best Actor for his role as Abid, and the film also won in categories including Best Makeup and Best Sound.

Is Dhaka Attack based on a true story? No. Its story, by Sunny Sanwar, is fictional, though it draws on the real structures, units and working methods of the Bangladesh Police — whose welfare association was among the film’s producers — and on the era’s genuine public anxiety about coordinated attacks on the capital.

How much did Dhaka Attack earn at the box office? Reported totals put it at around ৳9.5 crore, with about ৳7.5 crore of that in its first week — strong figures for 2017. As with all Bangladeshi box-office numbers, these are trade-reported and not independently audited.

Is Dhaka Attack suitable for children? It is an action thriller about bomb threats and organised violence, with intense sequences and a disturbing antagonist. It is best suited to teenagers and adults rather than young children.