“Yeh Somalia hai captain, yahan kaafi logon se haath milaane padte hain,” a deceitful businessman tells the Indian captain of a ship hijacked by Somalian pirates. It’s a declaration of the sprawling at times baffling scope of Disney+Hotstar’s Lootere. What begins as a routine thriller about the occupation of a Ukranian ship run largely by an Indian crew, gradually lounges out into a studious examination of a far-off, understudied land’s politics, its people and the bizarre business of seaside terrorism it is inevitably runs on. The captain of the ship, its crew aren’t the protagonist here. It’s the Somalia-born businessman hacking his way through the politics of the land and the conflict of the sea, towards eye-watering money and considerable portside diplomatic power. It’s a near miracle that a show like Lootere exists for it is astonishing in scale, ambitious in its widespread focus and near perfect as a thriller with a socio-political core.
A Ukranian ship carrying some secret cargo, is hijacked by a group of Somalian pirates off the coast of Harardhere. Captain of the ship AK Singh (Rajat Kapoor), along with a plucky but divided crew must contend with violent, gun-wielding men. But while the premise edges towards a straightforward survival thriller – with several nods to Tom Hanks’ Captain Phillips – Lootere hands the reigns to a businessman, hysterically trying to manipulate a crisis to his personal benefit. Vivek Gomber plays Vikrant a businessman who deals with shipping companies, but makes his dough by nefarious detours. He has a secret consignment aboard the captured ship that he fails to recoup to potentially fatal effect. What follows is a rollercoaster, that idiomatically at least adds depth, layers and sub-plots to the survival thriller genre. Everyone’s in for a piece larger than the one they pretend to be holding on to.
Firstly, Lootere is spectacularly shot, immersive in an awe-inspiring manner. The Somalian coast, the interpersonal confrontations, the onshore manoeuvring and the distant stakes – as far as a company in Russia – are well earned through excellent cinematography and some pitch perfect casting. The Indian actors are ably supported by a large African cast, led by the excellent Martial Batchamen Tchana as Barkhad, a somewhat sensible commander of the hijackers. Barkhad has his own mutineers and predatory, out-of-control subordinates to deal with.
The writing, it is evident wants to give each character room to breathe in the vast waters of the Somalian coast. So much at sea is viscerally numbed, it takes flawed humans to add some sort of colour and shade to laziness of the blue. There are other peripheral arcs that intriguingly stack up on the push-meets-shove pace of a survival thriller. Vikrant’s fragile relationship with his wife and his son, a young Somalian boy’s disappearance, a distant father-son deadlock and other schemers like Bilaal (Gaurav K Sharma) who fertilise a cottage industry of crime and peril, make up for stimulating, multi-faceted cruise.
Directed by Jai Mehta and backed by showrunner Hansal Mehta, Lootere pays homage to both the film it will inevitably be compared to and the cinematic grammar that Mehta introduced with the Scam franchise. These aren’t just cat-and-mouse games, but cautiously observed systems of rot at scale. For a young boy to wield a gun, it takes a village to naturalise his destitution. Somalian pirates, often treated as caricatures, get to play more than just greedy gunslingers. The violence, the audacity of it can be triggering, but it adds to the thickness of a show that wants to do more than just pit a bunch of intrepid good guys against some unremarkable but brutal bad ones. Though Kapoor is assured as ever, the entire cast turns in credible performances lifted by a palette willing to absorb a wide variety of shades, characters and motivations. The milieu, it’s doggedness to go as wide in scope as possible despite a couple of brittle extensions, feels rewarding for someone watching for immersion as opposed to easy catharsis. It’s why rescue takes the longest time, attempts to fight back are crushingly suppressed and the strained but patient dynamics of it all feels justifiably relaxed.
Again, it’s a near miracle that someone chose to greenlit a show that is kind of set in the middle of nowhere, has a largely foreign cast and dives into the hyperlocal workings of a distant, under-traced landscape. Moreover, the fact that director Jai Mehta and his co-creators went truly long form with a sense of responsibility towards telling not just the India-specific aspects but a story that tends to the very conditions of access and authority, feels miraculous. Lootere probably won’t find an audience as large as the Scam franchise, but it is in some sense, it truer to its language, scope and scale. It’s lifted by terrific performances, punctuated by a great background score, and even though it dips in terms of momentum every now and then sails out to sea on a high. It’s one of the few times an Indian show’s ambition seems to augur well for the slippery, at times isolated, self-indulgence storytelling can often reek of.
Lootere is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar
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