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‘Jewel Thief’ Movie Review: Saif Ali Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat Cannot Rescue Kitschy Heist Thriller
The problem with unserious cinema today is its templatisation, as the streaming algorithm flattens the self-awareness
Directors: Kookie Gulati, Robbie Grewal
Writers: David Logan, Sumit Arora
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat, Nikita Dutta, Kunal Kapoor
Language: Hindi
Streaming on: Netflix
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!”
The film opens with an ominous art dealer named Rajan Aulakh (Jaideep Ahlawat), who smokes a cigar (the ones that Manish Chaudhari characters usually chomp on) and smashes his accountant to pulp so that his dried blood can be turned into an abstract painting. Not the worst idea. In grave debt, Rajan decides to summon the services of world-famous con artist Rehan Roy (Saif Ali Khan) the way villains usually do: sneakily deposit black money into Rehan’s estranged father’s account and threaten a tax raid. The Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar ode is inescapable because this single father (who prefers one son over the other) is played by veteran actor Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Rajan’s ploy means Rehan has to leave his own cigar-smoking, tub-lounging and one-night-stand-fuelled life in Budapest to come back home (he turns himself in and uses a Sikh cop’s diplomatic passport to deliver an unnecessary Sacred Games hat tip) — and ‘work’ out of Rajan’s Alibaug villa to plan the theft of an African diamond called the Red Sun.
Naturally, Rajan also has a pretty and mysterious painter-wife (Nikita Dutta, as Farrah) whom he assaults every night. It’s a matter of time before curated sparks fly between the caged woman and the suave guest. Either Rajan is stupid for inviting someone who looks like Saif Ali Khan into his family space or Rehan is stupid for assuming that a baddie played by Jaideep Ahlawat will not notice their little affair. As it turns out, I am stupid for second-guessing all three. In a post-Ocean’s 11 landscape, it’s hard to make a wildly original heist thriller about a crook stealing the wife of the crook he works for. The Bollywood iterations of the genre have no choice but to aim for so-bad-it’s-good entertainment.
The point is to commit to the camp. That’s why you have Khan’s royal swag (I still dig how he speaks Hindi like he’s teasing the language) face off with Ahlawat in his light-eyed-Nawazuddin-Siddiqui era. That’s why the plot aspires to make as little sense as possible. Like simulating a medical emergency on a flight (to showcase Farrah in an air hostess uniform), convincing the pilot to divert to the nearest airport, but then blackmailing the same pilot into crash-landing in a park — which they could’ve done from the beginning — so that his struggle in the cockpit looks like a bad night in bed. Or the brief presence of a blue-haired hacker who looks like a video game avatar of herself. Or fake diamonds posing as real diamonds posing as fake diamonds. It’s cuckoo on many levels, but the film will have you believe that Everything Is Planned.
The problem with unserious cinema today is its templatisation. The streaming algorithm flattens the self-awareness; not even the Siddharth Anand-patented techno-dance background score can undo it. There’s an investigative piece waiting to be done on the popping colour palette of every other Netflix original. Jewel Thief adopts this visual identity to a fault; nearly every scene resembles the radioactive chemicals in Dexter’s laboratory. The fluorescent greens, neon reds, hot pinks and seedy blues are written into shots and settings — at times, it feels like Rajan kills people so that fresh blood can diversify this vivid palette. Lipstick shades, too, are of the glow-in-the-dark variety. Heaven forbid we see a dry tubelight or normal street lamp by mistake; even a random terrace has funky disco vibes.
If research shows that the human eye or mind is susceptible to these colour combinations, the sheer visibility of the design defeats the purpose. Not to mention that the characters are then lit to look like AI-generated versions of themselves. It’s like watching the future throw a temper tantrum on an empty stomach. Irreverence cannot be a formula, especially when you have moments like a hijacker using Google Maps to show a pilot where he wants the plane to land. Or a jewel thief narrating a long-winded fable about a lion, wolf and rabbit to convey that he’s tricked the gangster, his henchman, the audience, the twists and the general oxygen they inhale.