Jewel Thief - The Heist Begins

A thought occurred to me while watching Shauna Gautam’s much-derided Nadaaniyan – starring Ibrahim Ali Khan and Khushi Kapoor. To be fair, it was 2.30 am (the hour of epiphanies) on a Saturday, and I was watching it for some laughs. After a while the clunky dialogue, the stiff performances and the air-brushed palette of the film began to feel more deliberate. The film was obviously beyond salvaging, but after a point it seemed like some studio executive had instructed the makers to lean into the ‘badness’ of the film, try to make it as grating an experience for the audience as possible. The thought behind it probably being: if you can’t make the best film, you might as well try and make the worst film out there. In an ocean of content, this might be a way to generate conversation, and stand out. What else explains so many shoddy choices, one after the other, going unchecked? Either that, or the crew, the producers and the platform had fully given up on the film.

Jewel Thief — The Heist Begins is the sort of trashy, twisty Abbas-Mustan-coded pulpfiction that’s devised to trigger our dormant trust issues. Everyone is tricking everyone else: characters are tricking each other, the script is tricking its characters, the film is tricking its viewers, the action is tricking gravity, the viewers are tricking themselves. Even cities lie: Los Angeles pretends to be Istanbul, screensavers pretend to be Alibaug, Budapest pretends to be Budapest. Everything is a twist and everyone is a human smirk. A stylish thief is blackmailed by a gangster into stealing a priceless gem, and all that happens in his week-long heist — first in a Mumbai museum, then mid-air on a flight to London (imaginatively called SkyFly Airlines) — is unreliable: failure, success, love, betrayal. Luck is for losers. Is anything real? Perhaps only the cop who spends the film narrowly missing the thief and yelling: “He f*cking played us!”

Can a film featuring Saif Ali Khan and Jaideep Ahlawat and a diamond bigger than the Ritz turn out to be a shockingly banal bauble?That’s not a trick question. It is something I’ve been asking myself since I finished watching ‘Jewel Thief A Heist Begins’, a face-off between a too-cool-for-school jewel thief (Saif Ali Khan), and a nattily-turned out mobster (Jaideep Ahlawat) who has a thing for pulping humans with his bare hands. Given that heist films are a dime a dozen, the least one can expect when you’ve got these two leads, fully capable of generating fizz, is to give us flash and pizazz and non-stop thrills, because that’s what the best high-stakes, high-on-adrenaline ‘heere-ki-chori’ films are about.

A red diamond brings the worst out of two men—a criminal kingpin and a globetrotting con artist—in Jewel Thief - The Heist Begins. The trouble is, it does not spare the film either. Jewel Thief - The Heist Begins, all style and no substance, is an abomination of monumental proportions. Beyond trite, it rests on a premise that should have been snuffed out on paper itself. The precious object that two combatants are ready to die for is of African provenance. It triggers a rigmarole that traverses the world—Budapest, Istanbul, Mumbai—for inspiration. It finds none. The heist thriller piles inanity upon inanity and never pauses to ponder why. Produced by Siddharth Anand’s Marflix Pictures, the Netflix film is directed by Kookie Gulati and Robbie Grewal. It has come from the stable that delivered War, Pathaan, and Fighter. Don’t let that fool you.

With the OTT platforms investing more energy and intensity into the long form, feature films are languishing like one-day cricket. Rehan (Saif Ali Khan), a rakish thief, is hired by Rajan Aulakh (Jaideep Ahlawat), a criminal in the garb of an art collector, to steal Red Sun, the African equivalent of Kohinoor. The title ‘Jewel Thief’ unnecessarily draws comparisons with Goldie’s iconic crime caper. The makers even drop the name of Vijay Anand in one sequence, but could mine precious little out of flattery. Saif and Jaideep have cut down on flab and look fab in crisp suits. It is hard to decipher who has a better drawl or could chew the scenery and the vowels better. While the boys jostle to steal the scene, an elegant Nikita Dutta sparkles in a glam avatar. However, the visual aspect fails to liven up the flat writing and insipid music.

The spice factor is sorely missing in director duo Kookie Gulati and Robbie Grewal’s bland, banal heist caper, which has nothing to do with Vijay Anand’s 1967 classic of the same name except a cursorily doffed hat. Already abundant Hindi hack jobs of the ilk have moviegoers well-versed in the art of big-screen robbery involving the same old tricks of nicking passwords and fingerprints, cracking codes and combinations, dodging high security and noisy alarms to feel any real excitement around Jewel Thief’s surprisingly low stakes burglary. It doesn’t help that the sought-after Africa Ka Kohinoor, known as the Red Sun, looks like a cheap Christmas ornament that our protagonists tell us is valued at Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion) in the underworld market.