Jewel Thief - The Heist Begins

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.

The camera globetrots. Budapest, Istanbul, Mumbai, London. Everybody’s cool. Rehan Roy (Saif Ali Khan), a fingersmith who’ll steal the necklace off your body or the mobile in your pocket with smart smoothness. A tad James Bondish too, the names of women in bed don’t matter. And he is the ultimate jewel thief, popular in the crime world as unmatched, unbeatable. Rajan Aulakh (Jaideep Ahlawat), the Page 3 rich man. So unflinching cool that the rottweiler he fed with his hands as a puppy gets a bullet in its forehead for cosying up to Rehan. So cool that he’ll watch a piece of art on his wall and admire its splosh of colour. It’s real dried blood of a human he’d strangled for tattling on his offshore accounts. Deficit of trust brings out the underworld gangster in him.

There’s a lot of suspension of belief and logic in Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins. A master jewel thief goes so under the radar that the authorities can never quite catch him. And then there’s the actual heist which tries to pull the wool over audiences’ eyes over and over again. Produced by filmmaker Siddharth Anand, the Netflix thriller sets up a predictable narrative with familiar characters. Rehan Roy (Saif Ali Khan) is the world’s best jewel thief in exile after his father disowns him. But a blackmail scheme from art collector Rajan Aulakh (Jaideep Ahlawat) draws him back to India, where he could be arrested at any moment. The impossible mission he has been recruited for is to steal Africa’s Kohinoor, the Red Sun diamond, valued at over Rs 500 crore. Rehan and Rajan must work together and try not to kill each other before the heist is completed. The feature also adds in a complicated romance angle with the introduction of Farrah (Nikita Dutta), Rajan’s wife.

In terms of definition and DNA, the heist genre has had one formula down pat — style is greater than substance. The films in this world demand a willing suspension of disbelief in exchange for the promise of edge-of-the-seat thrills, high-octane action sequences, pretty people strutting around in eye-pleasing locations and, more often than not, a final twist that makes even the most ridiculous bits that precede it, worth it. Somewhat. Jewel Thief — The Heist Begins (it ends close to two hours later with the ‘warning’: The Heist Continues’, no spoiler this) ticks off all the tried-and-tired tropes of the genre to slapdash a heist film which evoked an unthinkable emotion within me — I missed the Race films (yes, yes, I am embarrassed). For whatever it is worth, the three films in the Race franchise — two of which starred Saif Ali Khan — oscillated, within its twist-a-second template, between lousy and ludicrous. Jewel Thief is, politely put, simply lame.