The heist drama with a heart of gold has become a familiar subgenre. But ‘Blast’, director Aakash Bhatia’s sophomore feature, gives it a fresh coat of paint—not by reinventing the wheel, but by focusing on characters who have rarely been centred before: middle-aged, working-class, and deeply flawed .
‘Blast’ follows Gajraj Rao’s Jagdish, a safekracker who has spent a lifetime breaking into things but never quite building anything stable—least of all his marriage to Sunita (Sanya Malhotra). Their son (Rohan Singh) is a sharp-tongued teenager who has little patience for his father’s excuses. The family’s fragile ecosystem is thrown into disarray when a high-profile heist goes wrong, forcing this motley crew of petty criminals and dissatisfied spouses to become an actual crew.
The unlikely family dynamic
What ‘Blast’ gets right is its refusal to sentimentalise its characters. Jagdish is not a lovable rogue with a heart of gold; he is a man running on ego and nostalgia, and the film takes its time revealing the disappointments that shaped him. He is a safekracker by trade, but his greatest fear is that he is slowly being locked out of his own family .
The chemistry between the three leads is the film’s anchor. Gajraj Rao delivers another masterclass in playing ordinary men with extraordinary emotional complexity. His Jagdish can be infuriatingly stubborn in one scene and heartbreakingly vulnerable in the next. Sanya Malhotra matches him beat for beat as Sunita, a woman who has spent years in the background of her husband’s life and has finally had enough. Her arc—from silent resentment to active agency—is the film’s quietest and most effective achievement.
Rohan Singh, as the teenage son caught between admiration and anger, holds his own against both seasoned actors. The film wisely avoids turning him into a precocious sidekick. He is awkward, angry, and uncertain—exactly as a 16-year-old watching his family implode should be.
The heist and the hiccups
The heist sequences are competently staged, though they lack the tautness of the genre’s best. Bhatia’s direction shines in the quieter, domestic moments—the silences across a dinner table, the unspoken guilt in a car ride. The film’s second half, however, loses some of its grip. A subplot involving a rival gang feels shoehorned in, and the climax, while explosive, undermines the careful character work that preceded it. The resolution wraps things up a little too neatly, and a final twist feels unearned.
Supporting cast and technicals
The supporting cast includes Vijay Raaz as a philosophical fence and Neena Gupta in a brief but scene-stealing role as a no-nonsense mother-in-law. Vijay Raaz’s character delivers some of the film’s most memorable lines, though his arc remains frustratingly incomplete.
The cinematography captures the cramped, lived-in spaces of lower-middle-class Mumbai with authenticity. The sound design, particularly during the heist sequences, deserves mention—the clicks of locks, the hum of fluorescent lights, the muffled conversations through walls.
Verdict
‘Blast’ is at its best when it resists genre trappings and focuses on the unlikely family at its core. The film is gripping in its emotional stretches, patchy in its action beats, but consistently anchored by performances that make you care about people you might otherwise dismiss. It may not reinvent the wheel, but it drives it through lanes you haven’t seen before.
