Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins Review: What a Disaster

Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins Review: In this thrilling Netflix heist film, a master thief gets blackmailed to steal the most valuable diamond of South Africa, the Red Sun. However, what starts off as just another routine, albeit a bit tougher than normal, job turns into something more dangerous as loyalties shift and people start to double-cross one another.

The film has a runtime of around 120 minutes.

Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins Review

The biggest problem with Hindi heist thrillers these days is that they are entirely unimaginative, leaving us thoroughly unimpressed throughout the runtime. Netflix’s Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins is on the same boat as a lot of other thrillers — they don’t try to be anything more than generic and mundane. There’s a popular proverb in Bengali called “গল্পের গরু গাছে চড়ে”, which means that even a cow can climb a tree in a story. Something similar happens in this thriller, where cows truly do get on trees (not literally).

Following a brilliant jewel thief who is tasked to steal the Red Sun from a high-security art gallery, the film never treads on any path other than what one might expect. Even then, it’s so brain-dead that I found myself looking for my will to live every few minutes. The thing about Jewel Thief is that it’s extremely stupid. There’s just no two ways about it. Things happen for no apparent reason and keep on happening. There’s neither parity nor thrill. It’s as if Saif Ali Khan can simply do a sexy smirk, and everything he wants comes true.

From beginning to end, the film showcases bad boy Rehan trying to get to the Red Sun while Ahlawat, as Rajan Aulakh, looks at him menacingly. Aulakh has different coloured pupils for some reason, probably to bring home how menacing he is, and he hits his wife to boot. After the initial formalities are done, we dive into one unnecessary and impossible stunt after another with a background score that sounds. a bit too similar to You Know My Name from Casino Royale.

None of the heists are fun or remotely fresh and won’t get your blood pumping even the tiniest bit. It’s just one trainwreck and absolutely stupid plot point after another. At one point, they hijack a commercial plane as if that’s nothing because you obviously won’t be called a terrorist if you hijack a plane. I think the point of Jewel Thief is that no one expected us to actually take it seriously — it is only supposed to be a 2-hour joyride that you watch as you chat with your loved ones.

And maybe on that note, it’s not bad. It’s a forgettable action-thriller with no action or thrill and full of plot holes. But what infuriated me the most is how stupid the film thinks its audience is. From start to end, the most meaningless plot points are broken down multiple times, usually a second after some twist is introduced (if you can call it that). There’s no space for audiences to actually use their brains to understand; we must be told exactly what the previous scene means down to its very last atom.

All of these characters are bland and without any personality as well. It’s a copy and paste of all the characters (good and bad) that we have watched over the year, stripped of everything that made them somewhat unique. Rehan has daddy issues, and Rajan is just a bad guy. Farah is just a flower pot who doesn’t have any character or personality. Don’t worry, even Kunal Kapoor’s character is similar.

Final Thoughts

Jewel Thief truly gave me a headache. It’s everything that is wrong with Netflix India right now and highlights some of the reasons why the international shows keep doing better than ours. This might get a ton of views and even be on the trending list, but don’t get fooled — there’s nothing in this movie that you haven’t watched before. The biggest heartbreak is that it doesn’t even try to be remotely memorable.

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