Even though Jewel Thief, the new Saif Ali Khan starrer, was released as an OTT original, when you watch the movie, you can clearly see that it had a theatrical design. The way the title cards are shown, the broad stroke writing, the end credit song, etc., gives you that idea, and the movie even has an interval block. The film, which was initially directed by Robbie Grewal, underwent reshoots under Kookie Gulati. Sadly, despite all these efforts, this derivative of the Race franchise movies is atrociously bad, and it clearly shows you how clueless Bollywood is about finding an original voice.
Rajan Aulakh, an art collector, is going through a financial crunch, and to get out of that, he needs to execute a heist. For that, he decides to blackmail Rehan Roy, an infamous con artist who is under surveillance by Mumbai Police. The planning and execution of Rehan to get this expensive African ruby named Red Sun is what we see in Jewel Thief.
I called this movie a derivative of the Race franchise movies. Imagine how bad a film has to be to be called a tacky derivative of Race films. Jewel Thief is the kind of movie where you can’t even see a potential even as a one-liner. Because we have seen better versions of the same story in many other films. And when you are entering a space that is extremely familiar to the audience, you must have a different approach toward the same concept. But Jewel Thief is like just giving ChatGPT some character names and asking it to create a heist movie based on every other heist movie out there.
There is this extra bass to the voice of Saif Ali Khan in this movie, and at times, it becomes too evident that you might wonder whether he is mocking himself. As a performer, there is absolutely nothing there for Saif to do, and by the looks of the overall quality of the dialogues and scenes, I am more excited about any possible future interviews of Saif Ali Khan where he would spill the beans about uttering those cheesy lines. The only possible takeaway from the whole movie is seeing Jaideep Ahlawat dancing in that song sequence at the end. Jaideep is in swanky clothes, driving luxury cars, and flying in private jets. I guess clubbed with a probable good pay cheque it makes sense for him to occasionally sign a movie like this. Nikita Dutta gets a terribly written female lead role in the movie whose only purpose in the film was to look great and kiss on screen. Kunal Kapoor is supposed to be the Abhishek Bachchan of this Dhoom. But in order to make that character look intelligent, the script is making the entire police force a bunch of dummies.
Everything in Jewel Thief is borrowed or lifted from many other films. The drama in the hero’s life is the classic Hindi cinema trope of the 80s and 90s. And the romance and the “intelligence” in the heist are from the Abbas Mustan world of twists. There is a sequence in the movie where a plane is forced to land in the middle of the city, and how they have staged this scene will make you laugh. Somewhere, I felt instead of reshooting the film to make it better, they should have edited it differently and made it a spoof movie. You know, the Johnny English kind of stuff. Jishnu Bhattacharjee’s cinematography is trying to make the visuals look really colorful, and we have so much of neon lights in every frame, making it almost look like a game.
The post-corona OTT boom made a lot of people think that platforms like Netflix and Prime are going to give space to niche films to find their audience. Within five years of this assumption, we are seeing a drastic drop in the number of movies picked by OTT giants, and what they eventually chose to release is trash like Jewel Thief that even the actors of those films may have done as guilty pleasures. In some of the recent interviews, Saif Ali Khan had talked candidly about the quality of the kind of movies he did before Dil Chahta Hai. Well, Jewel Thief is an unintentional tribute to that phase of Saif’s career.
