BANK CHOR (U/A)
Director: Bumpy
Cast: Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Anand Oberoi, Rhea Chakraborty, Sahil Vaid
Running time: 129 minutes

When you need like 20 minutes to explain what exactly you were trying to do in the 100 minutes before that, you have a problem! That’s, of course, not the only problem with Bank Chor, a film which is neither funny nor thrilling and has a cast which had gone past their ‘best before’ date quite a few years back.

This Bollywood release before the Tubelight storm next week has a lot of eggs — mostly rotten — and they are all put in the same basket and that basket is labelled ‘twist ending’. That ending which even an Abbas-Mustan would have discarded is yet another self-congratulatory tribute to the Dhoom series by Yash Raj’s own Y-Films team. 

An unpalatable khichri of bank heist films like Dog Day Afternoon, Inside Man and The Bank Job, Bank Chor has a tired and repetitive Riteish Deshmukh trying too hard to be funny with not-so-lol results. He plays Champak Chandrakant Chiplunkar — the joke ends with the name — who along with two equally callous men try to rob a bank.

Before they can make much headway, the CBI is outside in the form of Vivek Anand Oberoi who plays officer Amjad Khan with the same body language and dialogue delivery as his Maya Dolas in Shootout at Lokhandwala. And just to make sure that there’s never any shortage in the hamming department, there’s Rhea Chakraborty playing a TV journalist.

In the bank itself is another bank chor, a slightly more serious-about-his-job chor, called Jugnu, played by Humpty Sharma’s sidekick Sahil Vaid, the only bright thing about this cast. The other two quality actors Upendra Limaye and Vikram Gokhale are reduced to special appearances. 

Unfunny one-liners, spectacularly loud acting, a plot which stalls more than streams, Bank Chor is one big headache and the carpeted background music only adds to the misery. This could have perhaps worked mildly as a web series but as a full-length feature film, it is an absolute no-no.

The three main actors of Bank Chor have never even been sure about their names. From Vivek to Viveik to Vivek Anand. From Ritesh to Riteish. From Chakravarty to Chakraborty. Champak, who is very particular about Vastu even when he is trying to steal a bank, should have known that this film is not going to be lucky for either one of them.

Pratim D. Gupta