‘Jewel Thief’ Review: Jaideep Ahlawat, Saif Ali Khan Flick Robs You of Patience
'Jewel Thief', starring Jaideep Ahlawat, Saif Ali Khan, and Nikita Dutta is streaming on Netflix.
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The best thrillers either make a fool out of you or are engaging enough for you to feel like the best armchair detective in existence when you figure the twists before they tell you. Making a heist move is about the push and pull –between the characters, between the filmmaker and the audience, between the predictable and the unexpected.
Jewel Thief, in no way comparable to the 1967 Dev Anand classic it takes its name from (and not much else), does manage to make a fool out of you but not in the way you would expect. It lures you in with the delicious premise of a diamond heist and packs the film with incredibly talented actors only to disappoint.
And the cast does try – they do their level best to make the corny dialogues and predictable, been-there-seen-that, twists work. Jaideep Ahlawat as the suave, ruthless criminal cum art collector Rajan Aulakh cuts quite an impressing figure in his crisp suits and slick-back hair. Ahlawat is a force on screen – even if the script doesn’t give him much, he can take a character very far with a scowl and a frustrated flip of the wrist. Then there’s Saif Ali Khan as the titular ‘jewel thief’ Rehan Roy – there’s no task too difficult for him, except (you guessed it) finding love.
Or making the line ‘steal the red sun in the gagan (air)’ work.
Khan plays Rehan with the same tongue-in-cheek swagger as his Race character except he adds just the right amount of rustic charm to set the two apart. Now you’re on the edge of your seat, what else could this film throw at you that you have definitely seen before? Enter Nikita Dutta as Farrah, Rajan’s mysterious but alluring wife (she’s a painter if you missed that) who Rehan is instantly drawn to. It’s Bollywood and this is expected; it would even work if the writing gave her literally anything else to do.
It’s a pity too because Dutta constantly seems on the precipice of something better – just one meaty scene for her to show the audience what she can do. But it never comes. There are multiple other characters littered through the plot – Rehan is given the estranged father (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) sob story and a silent spectator of a brother (Gagan Arora). And naturally since this is a heist story, there’s Kunal Kapoor as the cop who is always going to be one step behind the criminals (this is not a spoiler; the writing simply isn’t smart enough to add any real stakes to the story).
So even when tensions must rise, it feels forced like when our gang of crooks manage to manufacture a medical emergency to force a pilot to reroute the plane only to then blackmail him to land it in the middle of a park. Why not use the blackmail in the first place? Perhaps an oversight one could ignore if the rest of this brilliant plan didn’t have at least five loopholes in it – why do the flight attendants vanish from the plane when it’s convenient to the plot?
There’s even a crime lord in Istanbul (Laitongbam Dorendra Singh as Moosa) who has a history of distrust with Rajan. The sight of him sitting back and watching people risk their lives in a sick game (a la Squid Games) is meant to plant the seed of terror in the audience. And it would have worked had the entire film not shown time and time again that….nothing happens.
Jewel Thief is pretty, glossy, and pumped with so much colour you can feel it at the back of your eyes for days, but it lacks the creative intensity of a film like Bullet Train, another moving-vehicle heist movie that somehow manages to up the ante on itself constantly even at the threat of bordering on nonsensical.
Granted that it’s getting harder to make a truly original heist film – we have practically seen it all at this point but that doesn’t justify shoddy writing. If the film does remain engaging, it’s because of the performances – because the actors truly manage to make you believe that there’s more to the story.
Yet, the movie’s most frustrating aspect is its choppy pacing, hampered further by ill-planned editing. The concept of juxtaposition in cinema is as old as time, especially in a thriller but the film’s use of it feels forced. There’s either too much going on or too little with rarely enough balance for the contrast or the race of time to stick.
The cinematography is impressive when it comes to establishing shots but when the scenes become more close quarters – be it action or otherwise – the cracks begin to appear. And maybe you could’ve forgiven all of this – I’ve watched movies that aren’t always technically the best but manage to pull through with sheer will – but even the background music feels right out of a video game. Granted, video game music has sometimes led to memorable gems but not this time around.
Jewel Thief is all chaos and forced wit but it’s a repetitive exercise in formula filmmaking chock full of every technical aspect trying to make up for lapses in another and characters that look great in the first draft of a script but shouldn’t have made it to the reading table without much more work.