It’s sacrilege that Jewel Thief, starring Saif Ali Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat, Nikita Dutta, and Kunal Kapoor, shares its name with perhaps the most iconic heist film ever made in India, Vijay Anand’s Jewel Thief. The OG Jewel Thief, whose cast included Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar, Vyajayanthimala and Tanuja, blended characteristics of a conventional heist film with elements of a crime thriller. As I watched the new Jewel Thief, which is strangely both loud and lackluster, I couldn’t help but wonder why Bollywood has not been able to make a crackling heist story. A stylish, slick entertainer like an Ocean’s 11, or an intense, violent interpretation like Reservoir Dogs.
While we have made remakes like Kaante, or taken inspiration from Hollywood films like Fast and Furious for the Dhoom series, there are very few Bollywood heist films that are rooted in an Indian milieu or have relatable characters and motivations. There are a few exceptions, like Aankhen (2002), which was based on the Gujarati play Aandhlo Pato and Special 26, which was based on an actual incident that took place at a jewellery store in Mumbai. But others like Happy New Year, Players (a remake of The Italian Job), Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga, or Crew are just some examples of how we have struggled to adapt the heist film to an authentically Indian context.
Heist films are typically placed under the umbrella of crime films and follow the different stages of planning and executing a seemingly impossible robbery. There may be smaller crimes or cons as a part of the larger plan and preparation for the grand heist. Usually, a team leader or alpha comes up with the idea of stealing a bank, robbing rare jewellery or cracking open an uncrackable safe. The motive can be personal, like vengeance, or recovering an item that was lost from an earlier heist, a fondness for breaking the law, good old greed, or the desire to commit one last crime before retiring with the loot.
Once the goal is set, it’s time to build a team. Some old associates and some new recruits, each with a unique skill, are brought together by the leader to successfully complete the heist. In an article for the BBC, writer Anne Billson credits Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (1954) for popularising the ‘assembling of the team’ trope that is now an integral part of heist films. Bilson writes, “The film launches into the mother of all ‘assembling the team’ sequences, now an obligatory part of so many action and heist movies.”
In The Italian Job (2003), the team planning to steal gold bars from a safe in Venice has a computer expert, a fixer, someone skilled in opening safes, an explosives expert and a getaway driver. In Ocean’s 11, given the requirements of the heist, the team includes an acrobat, an elderly con man, and a pickpocket who are crucial to the plan’s success. In our very own Dhoom, the good guys form a team to track down the thieves. Super cop Jay (Abhishek Bachchan) has to recruit Ali (Uday Chopra), a street racer with a garage owner, to crack a case involving bank robbers who escape on motorcycles.
But as it often does in life, even the best laid plans can go wrong or fail, leading to chaos, cat and mouse chases, bloodshed and infighting within the team. In the iconic Reservoir Dogs and its adaptation Kaante, the thieves find themselves in a ‘Mexican standoff’ and end up shooting each other dead. Though the heist is successful, suspicion and greed lead to murder and mayhem after the robbery. In Dhoom 3, Abhishek Bachchan manages to create a temporary rift between the twin Aamir Khans, Samar and Sahir. The two have been stealing from different branches of the Western Bank of Chicago to avenge the death of their father, who died by suicide because the bank wouldn’t give him more time to repay a loan. Sahir and Samar are chased by the police after their final heist, but they die together instead of facing separation.
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Interestingly, till 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code in Hollywood prevented the glorification of criminals and did not allow criminals to go unpunished. It was only after the code was removed that filmmakers could start experimenting with characterisation or focus on different aspects of the heist itself. So, while Reservoir Dogs focuses on the violent aftermath of the heist, Heat, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, begins with a heist gone wrong that sets the group of thieves on a far more violent path than they anticipated.
No discussion about heist films can be complete without a mention of the cool nicknames and code names used by the team of thieves to avoid implicating themselves to witnesses or bystanders. Whether it’s calling each other by numbers in Aankhen, or naming team members by cities like Tokyo, Berlin and Helsinki in Netflix’s hit series Money Heist; concealing identities or adopting false names adds a layer of drama and intrigue to the film.
Perhaps what makes heist films popular is the element of daredevilry and audacity that the common man aspires to but can very rarely act on. The group of thieves in such films is very rarely a bunch of super villains or murderous psychopaths. They are regular-looking men and women who can blend into the crowd and even have regular day jobs before they get a chance to use their skill set to earn a lot more money than they ever thought possible. India, with its gaping economic disparities and a love for drama reel and real, is a great environment to set a heist film in. Sadly, we always end up playing on the same tropes of stealing gemstones from a museum or artefacts from exotic foreign locations.
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Jewel Thief, circa 2025, could have been a mildly entertaining film if it had not been so determined to simply rehash ideas from every film already made. From CCTV camera blind spots, red beams of light protecting exotic foreign jewels, to underground tunnels conveniently located under museums, it’s all been there, stolen that. Let’s stop paying hat tips to Mr. Vijay Anand by using his name as the thief’s alias and instead study how fabulously he reimagined the heist film in an Indian context. We deserve better than Saif Ali Khan and Jaideep Ahlawat in bad hair and makeup, mouthing dialogues that make Abbas Mustan seem like Scorsese.
