Lootere: Vivek Gomber Leads An Effective Hijack Drama

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WITH TIME, comes stagnation. The Hindi streaming space today is stacked to the brim with long-form shows that look and unfold like each other. So dense is this sea of gore that it itself has become a parameter of sorts, forcing outings to compete with each other on common ground. Jay Mehta’s Lootere, the new eight-episode series about a ship hijacking, is an extension of this, and a departure. It unravels as a chaotic thriller and uses the scaffolding of the genre to transpire as a compelling social drama which puts forth commentary without actively pursuing it.

The result is a wholly original show that has no precedent in anything we have seen in the Hindi streaming space. Lootere is an inventive piece of fiction that creates its beat as it moves along and thrives with plucky ambition, craft and intent which holds the show in good stead even when things go a little awry. Mehta, who previously co-directed Scam 1992 (2020) with father Hansal Mehta, treads along a path of his own making that continues to be admirable even when messy.

Despite the ingenuity, some obvious comparisons open up. The chief among them is with Paul Greengrass’ 2013 hijacking film, Captain Phillips. The similarities are evident. Much like Tom Hanks’ film, even Lootere centres on a ship that gets attacked by Somali pirates. The thrilling pilot episode closely follows the blueprint of the film and in a sneaky hat tip, the main pirate in the series, Barkat, is named after the actor who played the titular role in Captain Phillips: Barkhad Abdi.

But Lootere is the work of many minds – it is created by Shaailesh R Singh , the story is by Anshuman Sinha, and Vishal Kapoor and Suparn S Varma are credited with the writing. The investment shows. It unfolds entirely in a foreign land (it says Somalia but is shot in South Africa), the actors are cast with uncompromising accuracy and the series uses the fragile geopolitics of the African country to underscore observations, both big and small, that retain relevance beyond the limits of one nation.

The story revolves around ​​Vikrant Gandhi (Vivek Gomber giving a career-defining performance), an Indian origin businessman who lives in Somalia with family. He is the port president of Mogadishu and fairly early in the series, Gandhi stands to lose it all when his underhand dubiety (for which his business is a front) threatens to be revealed. Central to his crisis is a Ukranian ship bearing goods (guns for a terrorist outfit called AL Muharib) and manned by a South Asian crew — 10 Indians, 2 Pakistanis and 1 Bangladeshi. To hinder the imminent disclosure, Gandhi launches a pirate attack on the ship that quickly spirals out of control.

Mehta uses this to design an unrelenting survival thriller where, as the nature of the genre goes, someone survives but no one wins. With Lootere, he touches upon the outsider-insider dichotomy. Gandhi is an Indian in Somalia. His acute status of an immigrant (at several points in the series, everyone from his associates to the cops tell him to leave the country) is mirrored if not imbibed by the Somali pirates whose existence is hardly acknowledged by the government. Unlike Gandhi, they might live in the country but the government does not care for them. They inhabit their own status of an outlander, overlooked and unacknowledged. Piracy on the high seas becomes a means for them to put food on the table.

Equally fascinating is the craftiness with which this setting doubles up as a premise, to uphold questions about identity whilst skewering the idea of heroism. For a show like Lootere, that opens to easy binaries of insider-outsider and invader-invaded, postulations about specifications about a hero feels inevitable. The series not just sidesteps it but revamps what one understands by heroism. Take for instance the way it depicts the crew members (led by Rajat Kapoor) who were under attack by the pirates. They resist but none emerges victorious. They follow orders, get beaten down and eventually give in.

But Lootere, scored to an excellent Achint Thakkar soundtrack, really shines when it zooms close. The engineer of the ship is a man called Zafar, a Pakistani who gets scared by the pirates and tells them they are in the same team since they belong to the same faith. The writing is top-notch here as it manoeuvres tricky terrain with gritty conviction and presents a man, who in any other series would have carried the burden of proving his loyalty, as the most human. He is the only one who aspires to live when confronted with the choice of posthumous glory. Even Gandhi’s character, written as anti-hero (Gomber, with his slouched shoulders and suits is reminiscent of Pratik Gandhi from Scam 1992) scampers for heroism at the end. He strives to save someone as a last-ditch effort to redeem himself — something the series denies. It becomes a way for Lootere to insist that when existence becomes volatile, and living ceases to matter, then the sheer act of surviving becomes heroic.

The only one who deviates from this is a female crew member called Ayesha (Preetika Chawla). She is the only one who puts up a fight, kills and survives. For a series that refuses to settle for easy reading and refrains from monopolising the narrative as the story of only one person, this becomes a terrific choice of departure. Mehta and the writers galvanise her resistance as they reckon with a truth that imbues the series: for a woman, the whole world is waiting to rob her of her agency. In such a case, surviving is her default status and wanting to live becomes heroic.

A new episode of Lootere drops every Wednesay at midnight, on Disney+ Hotstar. Stream here.