Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga,Trips Over Its Own Smartness

Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga(Netflix)

Rating:  **

Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga is  like one extended gag gone too far. The  writers(Siraj Ahmed, Amar Kaushik  and  Raj Kumar  Gupta) must have brainstormed  in pursuit of  a sizzling-hot  heist caper/hijack drama  mixing Guy Ritchie  with Neerja.

The  cock(and bull)tail  is  anything  but heady,heading as it does from a  stab at  the adage “Do not  stretch your legs  beyond the size of  the  blanket ” to  “Hell hatch no fury like a woman scorned.”  It ends up  as a brackish brew of  Ek Haseena Tthi and  Neerja, lacking the high-speed dark suspense  of the  former and the heart-stopping  hijack plot of the latter.

Neha Grover(Yami Gautam  Dhar) meets Ankit Sethi(Sunny Kaushal, deserves better) midair. She is a flight attendant and he is a demanding passenger. He wants a vegetarian  meal. She gives him her own meal. Then she  gives him a lot more. Soon she is pregnant while  debtors  threaten to knock down Ankit’s door.

We are  apprised  of the  romantic situation in the first  fifteen minutes. The rest is  a dimaon heist saga  involving a corrupt politician, an imposter flight marshall  and sundry government officials including Sharad  Kelkar who  looks  very unhappy.Maybe he feels like a passenger  who  has boarded the wrong  flight.

Back to Ankit and Neha,what the couple plans to do  to overcome their hard times is not mentionable here,lest  the suspense is spoilt. But what  about the fact that  that  the  plot, going into trippy convulsions,   is hellbent on shooting itself  in the leg?

There is hardly any breathing space in the  narration. At one point in the hijack drama, Sunny Kausal pretends to have an asthma  attack and sneaks into the empty  business class of  the plane  from the  economy section, right  under the hijackers’  nose.

There is  very little coherence in the  storytelling.  It is more about upping the ante  than making sense. The  flashback sequences which  provide vital clues to  the present airborne  shenanigans, are  hastily dealt with, as if  the  director didn’t want any diversionary tactics to halt the  tempestuous  tempo of storytelling.

But sorry, speed  is  not  the  decisive  ingredient in a suspense thriller. Coherence is. That’s where  Chor … takes a dismaying drubbing. It  shifts the  onus of morality from one side to another  like  a game of chess where the pieces are  tampered with  before the game  begins.

By the time the flight lands and the passengers head for  the chaotic terminal we are way past the urge to know what happens next. We know that whatever it is, it is just a ploy to get our attention.