Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins has two directors. Neither seem to be around when they are needed the most. The plot seems to be floating on auto-pilot. With a script that seems to be written on a piece of toilet paper, this is possibly Netflix’s worst original motion picture of all times. We can’t tell what’s around the corner, though. There is a promise for a sequel at the end of this film, a promise I hope would be nipped in the bud.
As we can see, heist makes waste. Jewel Thief proves it. It is shocking to believe that something so shoddily written could have gotten past Netflix’s checkpost. What were the approvers thinking? What were the actors thinking? What were Saif Ali Khan and Jaideep Ahlawat thinking when they decided to be part of this bilge binge?
I had to repeatedly pinch myself to believe I wasn’t in a nightmare: the sloppy suspense, the trashy twists, and turns, the amateurish dialogues, the tawdry sets representing the locational arrogance of the rich and compromised, the constant shattering of glass walls to signify cataclysmic events… all this adds up to zilch, and zilch of very poor quality.
The least I expected were some solidly constructed confrontational moments between the two leads. Regrettably, Ahlawat and Khan are given lines that sound like banter at the nearest toll plaza. There is little character construction for the two actors who seem to be in this for fun (the zeroes on their pay cheques must have helped) . I hope they enjoyed themselves. We certainly didn’t.
I was specially disappointed by Ahlawat. He seems to have become a victim of his own fame, saddling his supposedly sly character with a profusion of pubescent pranks played on the suave Saif trying to let some of his savoir-faire rub off on his character. But it is a losing battle. There is no room in the dehydrated plot for any growth for any character.
Groaning under the lightness of lazy writing, Jewel Thief is that undercooked sloppy heist drama which we never thought we would get to see in this millennium. The treatment and plot manoeuvres are so old-school they seem to belong to the era of Victoria 203 a hit film from the 1970s where a piece of cutglass was “karoron ka maal”.
Frankly, the hijinks, that include an outrageously written inflight face-off which is meant to show Saif’s Rehan Roy in a flattering light, suck. There is no attempt to give the heist any kind of credibility , let alone closure. Every new twist sounds a deathknell .
This is not a film. It is a death trap, reminding us that that heist capers have had their day in our cinema. Long live Dhoom.
