There are good dramas, and there are films wrapped as dramas and delivered as dramas when the end product turns out to be an unintentional comedy. Directed by Ajay Singh, “Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga” revolves around a flight hijacking and how it unfolds in front of us, and the men involved in getting them to get going. Who is the mastermind behind the hijacking, and is there a much bigger target and agenda to make sure certain people get their revenge?
Spoilers Ahead
Prologue
“Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga” begins at Kullu Airport, where a bruised Ankit Sethi is interrogated by an investigating officer about why he was attacked brutally. Ankit claims he has no clue, and he would not have been here if he knew. Ankit, at this point, is clueless about why anyone would rough him up in this manner, and he has no idea why, of all the people around him, he is the one being interrogated. He is as oblivious to the situation around him as the investigation team because they both are trying to dig deep into the situation.
Neha And Ankit Love Story
The movie begins with Neha Grover preparing herself for the flight she is about to make from Al Barkat to New Delhi. This is a routine flight for her, and she, as a crew, is not expecting anything different this time. Along with her, Ankit is getting ready for the flight, and many other men who seem suspicious share a glance at other passengers while sitting at random places in the airport. As all of them board the flight, one gets to see the relationship that Ankit and Neha have shared in the past. It is revealed that they are a couple, and they are expecting a child. Ankit and Neha have a steady relationship going on, but their repeated glances at each other imply that something is going to happen that will probably change the course of their lives.
Ankit met Neha as a passenger, and they had their first meet-cute over Ankit being served the wrong kind of meal. Ankit is instantly attracted to Neha and offers to take her out to dinner. Ankit, being straightforward, went ahead and asked Neha out because he figured there was nothing to lose in case she refused. Neha does politely refuse because she is aware a businessman like him might be dating plenty of women in her profession. So, she need not pay any attention to him showing an interest in her. But destiny had other plans for both because they end up meeting frequently in the same city, and Ankit starts pursuing her again. Neha finally agrees to go out on a date with him, and they start hanging out often. They start dating and eventually fall in love. The duo had no qualms about falling in love because it all came easily. They liked each other and loved hanging out. Her profession and his business background also never became a problem for either of them.
Neha one day announces that she is pregnant, and Ankit is happy to know he can finally have a family with her. He proposes marriage, and Neha accepts it because this is what she eventually wants to do. Neha and Ankit’s trajectory till now seems all happy and cozy, and nothing could seem to go wrong from here on. Neha is content with her job and her life, and so is Ankit. But Ankit, to this point, has not revealed what business he does. She did not bother to ask the question because the suspension of disbelief makes people not ask basic questions to people; they want to date, a common trope in Hindi films.
Ankit reveals that he runs a diamond insurance company, and one client has been harassing him for a crime committed by an employee of his. The client is forcing Ankit to give back 20 crores, which was the cost of the diamonds that got stolen. Ankit does not have that kind of cash on hand, but the client is not ready to hear him out. Ankit is desperate and since Neha is his fiancée, he makes it a point to share his problems with her. He is not expecting her to churn out the money somehow, but sharing his problems with her lessens the burden on him. After hearing his story, Neha also reveals that her father was an accountant with an underworld don who was killed for a slight misplacement of money. Neha was with her father the day he was killed, and she got injured as well. She believes she has to help him repay the amount somehow. Ankit agrees with her belief in him and his conviction. Ankit and Neha have finally started revealing their baggage to make themselves feel lighter. Neha feels relieved to have shared her past and Ankit also feels content with sharing his financial problems. Knowing all of this, they can move ahead and fix their problems.
Their problems increased when the said client again sent his henchmen to heckle Ankit in broad daylight without worrying about the law-and-order situation. A pregnant Neha comes in between them to save Ankit when she is kicked in the stomach by the henchmen. She suffers a miscarriage because of it. Ankit and Neha had made plans for the baby, and because of Ankit’s problems, they ended up losing their future as well. Neha is fully enraged, decides to agree to give the money back, and offers to hatch a plan with him so that he can gather enough money to repay his debt. Ankit is hesitant about carrying out the plan, but they also have no choice but to be bold and make an attempt to get their hands on this big amount. Once this debt is cleared, the couple can plan for the future again.
‘Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga’ Ending Explained: Who Are The Hijackers? Why Was Ankit Sethi Deemed The Culprit?
Ankit’s other Arab client offers a diamond-studded phone to the home minister of India, but the man is a corrupt official himself and wants to take the phone to India through a safe channel. Ankit’s company is insuring the phone. The phone’s sim can be traced, and the Arab will receive a notification if anyone tampers with the phone or tries to remove the sim. So, it is physically impossible to steal the phone at all. The phone is also insured, and it will be replaced in case of any untoward incident. Ankit is present in the room when these discussions between the corrupt minister and the Arab businessman are going on, and he wants to make sure to plan around it in such a way that the phone getting stolen will not be an issue at all.
Ankit is in dire need of money, and he would go to great lengths to fetch the money for himself and Neha. Ankit must close the deal with this client, or his life will be in severe danger. With Neha having worked in the aviation industry for years, her expertise comes in handy to navigate inside the aircraft when the phone is being shipped with a courier. The whole point of carrying this heist mid-air is the SIM will not be active on the flight, which will make it easy for Ankit to switch the sim from the original diamond phone to a fake diamond phone and keep the diamond phone to himself without being traced. He also ropes in the minister’s secretary to this heist by luring him with the money he will receive by selling the original diamond-studded phone. This shows it is easy to bribe an Indian government official, especially when it comes to offering the said person a huge amount to carry out embezzlement. The secretary does not think twice before accepting the offer from Ankit because he is also greedy, but unlike Ankit, he is not desperate.
Ankit is desperate to get the money as soon as possible, and that’s why he plans to steal the phone from his client to repay the debt. Neha, being a supportive partner, goes all the way to formulate a plan that would help him and her make sure diamond studded phones get there safely before they land in Delhi. But the plan goes awry with the confusion that begins when Neha does not find the designated courier on the flight. Ankit is informed that they had to send another man to deliver the phone. Neha is informed that the said courier man will not eat or drink on the flight, and that would be an indication that he is the courier. But as the courier is finally detected by Neha and Ankit, the plane is hijacked by a group of terrorists demanding freedom for Kashmir.
A full-on hijack drama ensues from there on when the terrorists injure a passenger and is ruthless with the crew, especially Neha. Neha and the rest of the flight are clueless as to how a gunman would enter an aircraft, but since the incident has already happened, there is no looking back. The ground situation in India, intelligence agencies are called to handle the situation. The flight is also diverted to Kullu from Delhi. Ankit is rendered helpless at this point after the chaos. The courier man left the bag carrying the diamond-studded phone on the seat, and all the business class passengers were forced to move to economy class. Ankit must get hold of the bag to make sure the SIM exchange happens, and he can keep the phone to himself. But his desperation is sensed by the terrorists, and they beat him black and blue to teach him a lesson. Ankit does not stop there; he forces Neha to get the bag from the business class, hoping her being part of the crew would be helpful, but she is also powerless at the moment.
Ankit is losing his patience and his mind, for he cannot afford to lose the phone, and he cannot let the terrorists get hold of the diamond-studded phone. They wouldn’t want to part with it for the money they would be able to fetch from it. Ankit’s only goal is to make sure he gets hold of the bag. He is finding it hard to get a hold of it with terrorists wandering around. Ankit knows that with one false move, one of the terrorists would again beat him to a pulp and possibly kill him too, so he moves very carefully to the business class. The terrorist is asked to speak to government officials because the flight is just minutes away from landing. This is when Ankit is successful in carrying out the act, but he is again caught red-handed by the terrorist, and as expected, he is beaten up again. But Ankit manages to kill the terrorist. The flight marshal, who always remains armed, was rendered unarmed when the terrorist was rounding up the passengers. The same flight marshal gets the gun from the dead terrorist and kills the remaining terrorists, but not before he sees that Ankit is placed in the flight bathroom with a time bomb.
Ankit had only hoped that his problem would be solved by changing the SIM on the diamond phones much before landing, but with the bomb stuck on him and the fact he got beaten relentlessly by the terrorist, he is in an extremely dire situation, not knowing how he will even survive this. Ankit’s life is flashing before his eyes. All he wanted was to get the cash from selling the phone and live his life from here on. But with the situation gone out of hand, only the on-ground officials will only be able to sort out the matter.
Agent Shaikh of R&AW is heading the matter at Kullu airport. With the news of the terrorists’ neutralization reaching his ears, the passengers are immediately evacuated from the plane and taken to safety. First, the bomb squad disconnects the bomb from Ankit, and they conclude that it was a fake one. The police on the aircraft also reveal they could not find the bodies of the terrorists on the aircraft. At this point, Agent Shaikh is confused about what is happening and wonders if this is some sort of joke that was carried out or if there is an elaborate plan that is being carried out. Shaikh can only hope to find out through ruthless interrogation what just transpired in the last few hours. He is one of the best agents of the intelligence agency, and he is keen to know what is going on right under his nose. He tries to close the exits of the airport because he is sure that the terrorists have merged with the crowd at the airport, but none of the passengers can recognize them.
Shaikh will have to resort to interrogating suspicious travelers. But most of the passengers on the flight could name only Ankit because they remembered him for creating maximum drama. Ankit is finally interrogated, and he is asked why he created a ruckus inside a hijacked flight. Shaikh starts suspecting him because he can sense Ankit acting impatient and desperate. Shaikh sensed there was more to this man than he let the others know. He is sure Ankit is hiding something big; otherwise, the terrorists wouldn’t have just injured him.
Ankit’s partner in crime, the secretary, brought in a jeweler to check the condition of the diamond-studded phone. The jeweler immediately lets them know that the diamonds on the phone are fake. All of these incidents happen so quickly that there is hardly any time for Ankit to come to terms with the fact that things are getting out of hand for him. In that noise, after Shaikh lets him go, Ankit manhandles Neha in the washroom out of anger to reveal that he’d long been plotting to carry out this heist with her help. He never loved her, and that’s why he made sure to keep her under his thumb for carrying out this robbery. Ankit finally comes clean and reveals his intentions of gaining money, for which making use of an air hostess was crucial to him. Neha coming into his life was engineered almost perfectly by him until this hijack derailed his plans. Ankit had no intention of being with Neha after the plan was executed. He comes across as a selfish businessman who would take advantage of anyone to get to his goal.
Neha acts shocked until it is revealed that Neha was the one who was conning Ankit after all. Right after her miscarriage, Neha learns from a voice message that Ankit is planning to use her position as an air hostess to carry out a diamond heist. Realizing the father of her child never loved her, she plans an elaborate con within a con to make sure Ankit is persecuted. She’d retained her connections to people who had worked in the underworld, and she utilized them to plan an elaborate hijack plan to make sure Ankit falls into the trap. Along with that, it was her instruction that they physically harm Ankit. This was a revenge plan executed to make Ankit realize he wouldn’t be able to cheat on any other woman in his life. Neha was angry at the fact that she lost her child because of his con, and she probably will never forgive him for that. The only way she could ever feel better about herself is to punish him and make sure he goes behind bars. Neha had only one goal: to hurt Ankit for crossing the line. Neha has also seen the ruthlessness of the underworld, and she made sure to give him a showcase of that.
Ankit is let go by Agent Shaikh after the interrogation but is taken away by the home minister’s men for hatching a plan to con them and run away with the money. Shaikh also interrogates Neha to get the truth out of her, but her statements come across as ironclad, and there is no way to implicate her in this. Shaikh realizes it was indeed Neha who hatched an elaborate plan, but there is no evidence to prove she is the mastermind who formed a team to execute the plan. Neha is happy to have executed the plan with utmost ease and without letting anyone derail the plan. Neha finally confronts Ankit at the hospital and reveals to him her plan and how she figured out his con as well. She is happy to have been able to one-up a man like Ankit because his overconfidence led to him being dragged into the mud. There is no other way to put it across: Ankit will remain scarred for a while.
Will There Be A ‘Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga’ Sequel?
Ankit recovers from his injuries, and since he is out of the hospital, the first call he makes is to Neha, and hearing his voice, she disconnects the phone immediately. Neha is not keen on hearing the voice of the man who cheated on her and is willing to get away with the fact that he was responsible for her miscarriage. Ankit is in the mood to take his revenge on Neha for conning him. She was single handedly responsible for the downfall of his company and his career. Ankit will surely come back with a larger plan to make sure Ankit also pays for what she did to him. Ankit is a selfish man who is blinded by money and is completely cut off from his emotional side, for he does not think once of the pain he causes Neha by putting her through such agony of not only heartbreak but also a miscarriage. A sequel to “Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga” will solve the problem of who conned who and who was successful in the end.
Final Thoughts
“Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga” is a lazy attempt to make a drama into something that is so unintentionally hilarious that one can feel nothing but sad for actors like Yami Gautam and Sunny Kaushal being wasted in a screenplay so flat. The big twist in “Chor Nikal Ke Bhaaga” was easy to predict from a distance. Writers like Shiraz Ahmed, Amar Kaushik, and Rajkumar Gupta are known for delivering works that have been talked about in the past, but with this film, the screenplay went nothing but down like a plane with no chance of recovery. Flashback sequences, which are a lazy way to spoon-feed the audience and make them seem like the stupid ones, come across as a sluggish way to tell a story. There is no way to explain why this method is used to convey what the leads did, and it was not caught by the audience. Stories are supposed to challenge the audience, and they are not supposed to give them everything on a platter. Director Ajay Singh really lost the plot with this film. Not at all recommended.
