‘Jewel Thief’ review: A flat, garish heist film

What we do in memes doesn’t echo in movies. Studios want their releases to go viral so badly they’ll try and reverse engineer such moments. But more often, the things that work are simple and unpredictable—like 10 seconds of Jaideep Ahlawat dancing. Everyone was delighted to see Ahlawat do his best Travolta in OAFF-Savera’s catchy ‘Jaadu’ from Jewel Thief. Netflix quickly cut a Jaideep-focused promo. It’ll bring a few curious viewers to the film, where they’ll discover Ahlawat plays a character so boringly reprehensible that by the time the song comes around in the end credits, no one wants to see him dance.

Placing Jaideep Ahlawat and Saif Ali Khan in opposition is a good idea in theory: low-vibe grumbler versus high-vibe trickster. Rehan (Khan) is an internationally renowned jewel thief who’s been laying low. He’s hunted down in Budapest by his younger brother, who begs him to help out their father, with whom Rehan had a falling out. A thuggish art dealer, Rajan (Ahlawat), is blackmailing the retired doctor to get Rehan to Alibaug and help him rob a priceless  jewel called the Red Sun. And there’s a detective, Vikram (Kunal Kapoor), who’s been trying to catch Rehan for years. 

This is a promising, if not overly inventive, setup, and the prospect of Khan and Ahlawat matching wits as they execute a heist is encouraging. But Jewel Thief never becomes the fun, disposable film it could be. Part of the problem is Rehan the aesthete thief has no chemistry with Rajan, who’s just a thug. In building up Rajan’s danger, writers David Logan and Sumit Arora forget to make him just fascinating enough that we care to spend a whole film with him.

Moments after we’re introduced to him, Rajan batters and then chokes to death a debtor. He beats his girlfriend. He shoots a dog. All this wouldn’t matter so much if he had some wit, some magnetism. But Rajan is a garden variety psycho. It’s a waste of Ahlawat’s sardonic comedic talents to have him play a monotonous brute (he was a delightful brute in An Action Hero).

Netflix hopping onto a good film every once in a while shouldn’t obscure the fact that their non-series offerings are, by and large, tacky reject material that wouldn’t last a week in theatres. Kookie Gulati and Robbie Grewal’s film feels dated, very mid-to-late 2000s except for the cussing. It runs a little under two hours and there’s a lot of busy plotting and double-crossing. But the twists are either contrived or, more often, stale. A big failure revealed to be a fake-out? Next you’ll tell me the jewel isn’t real. 

Then there’s the colour correction—though overcorrection might be more accurate. Every scene has lurid reds, pinks, yellows, oranges leaping out. It’s like the film was run through a filter, and then through another, more extreme filter.  

It’s difficult to write about Jewel Thief without going department by department, pointing out flaws. Awful CGI: that shot of Khan riding his bike away as a building explodes in the background. Cheesy score. Weird writing: that Japanese tourist comedy bit. And so on, all the way up to Marflix, who gave us last year’s worst film in Fighter, and Netflix, who’ve already hosted two contenders this year in Jewel Thief and Nadaaniyan. 

Rehan checks into a motel as ‘Vijay Anand’ and wears a peaked cap for a scene or two. Otherwise, this Jewel Thief has no connection with the 1967 film, which remains a perfect soufflé of a thriller. It’s cute that the makers thought this might be a franchise; the full title is ‘Jewel Thief—The Heist Begins’. I’m pretty confident in saying it ends here.