A vegan meal, a diamond-studded phone case, a kick to Yami Gautam’s guts, and Sunny Kaushal’s broken nose. These are the things Netflix’s Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga would have been remembered for. But the film is too busy trying to trick the audience — and failing at it — to care if anything works out.
Directed by Ajay Singh, the film aspires to be a genre-bender by bringing tropes of a heist and hijack thrillers together. The lead characters, Kaushal and Gautam do the redundant mating dance long enough to bore everyone before they show their true selves. They need to rob diamonds worth Rs 120 crore on an international flight to get goons off their backs. And there’s a corrupt home minister sitting in Delhi who could become their victim. But they are upstaged by hijackers clad in staple ski masks.
The film has some clever twists, but even after dropping one bomb after another, there’s hardly any impact.
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Sunny Kaushal seizes the moment
The promising screenplay by Shiraz Ahmed and Amar Kaushik is shot aimlessly — it doesn’t move beyond banal airplane scenes. There is little character development of the hostages — they are shown to be completely out of focus and you stay unbothered about casualties. What disappoints the most is how Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga wastes away actors Sharad Kelkar and Indraneil Sengupta in its hurried plot. Kelkar as intelligence officer Sheikh has little screen presence to flesh out his character, and Sengupta is there only to stand in the shadows.
Meanwhile, Sunny Kaushal makes the most out of whatever gimmick he is made a part of. He commits to the role of a robber (Ankit) and loses his cool so naturally and seamlessly as if he’s unaware that he’s on camera. He has upped the ante of playing a robber — Nobody would feel sympathy for his character, the actor has ensured. Yami Gautam as Neha is equally devoted, but she is burdened with too many flashback scenes to deliver on the layers her character has. For a pawn who says checkmate in the end, Gautam is nowhere close to dominating the scene. She occasionally raises an eyebrow to express how she is winning at the game or how she is better than anyone who tries to cross her. But in all honesty, it doesn’t work.
The main culprit of the film’s failure has to be its editing. Charu Takkar, who also edited the Radhika-Apte starrer Ok Computer (2021), dishes out chaotic timeline jumps. Thankfully, Ketan Sodha’s background music and a few chuckles save the film from becoming the most botched-up heist thriller ever made. If the last scene isn’t something the film’s editor forgot to cut out, Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga might have had a sequel in store. If there was a need for it at all.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)