Ahead of the release of Chaar Yaar, Hindi Movie Buzz takes a look back at six heist and crime titles that Hindi cinema fans keep returning to, from the slick bike chases of Dhoom to the undercover cons of Don and the street-level hustle of Farzi. Kamal Pandey's Chaar Yaar arrives as a comedy-drama about four housewives - Shivangi, Mansi, Neha and Sakina - whose lives revolve entirely around their husbands and families until they decide to break free of a suffocating routine with a short trip to Goa. What begins as a vacation on their own terms spirals into a chain of events that changes their lives, and the film's mix of domestic frustration, female friendship and sudden upheaval places it in a long Bollywood tradition of stories where ordinary people are pulled into extraordinary trouble.
Chaar Yaar runs 126 minutes and is a Hindi-language Bollywood production directed by Kamal Pandey. The ensemble cast features Swara Bhasker as Shivangi, Meher Vij as Mansi, Shikha Talsania as Neha and Pooja Chopra as Sakina. Girish Kulkarni plays Madhukar Rane, Manish Chaudhary appears as DCP Mohite, Ali Quli Mirza plays Ashish, Mansi's husband, and Nayani Dixit rounds out the cast as Alisha Cresta. The film was released on 16 September 2022, and its TMDb rating currently stands at 0/10.
The six titles below share the film's interest in crime, deception and characters who step outside the lives laid out for them - though each approaches that territory from a very different direction.
The Dhoom franchise: style, speed and the perfect getaway
Few Hindi crime films are as synonymous with the big-screen chase as the Dhoom series. Built around stylish thieves, relentless cops and motorcycles that seem to defy physics, the franchise turned the heist into pure spectacle. The appeal lies less in the mechanics of any single robbery than in the fantasy of the escape - the sense that someone can outrun the law, and an ordinary life, on two wheels. That fantasy of breaking loose is precisely the impulse that sends the four women of Chaar Yaar toward Goa.
The Don films: the con artist as hero
Don remains the gold standard for the Hindi crime thriller built on doubles, disguises and reversals. Its enduring hook is the pleasure of never quite knowing who is playing whom, and of a protagonist whose moral position shifts with every scene. Where Chaar Yaar trades in housewives stumbling into the unknown, Don offers the opposite thrill: a central figure who controls every twist. Both, however, understand that crime on screen is most satisfying when the audience is kept one step behind.
Farzi: the counterfeiter next door
Farzi brought the crime drama to the small screen with a story rooted in counterfeit currency rather than glamorous robberies, following a struggling young man whose talent for printing fake notes draws him into a dangerous world. Its tension comes from the ordinariness of its protagonist's frustrations - the same kind of everyday pressure that Chaar Yaar locates in the domestic routines of its four leads. In both cases, the leap into risk feels less like a genre convention and more like a plausible response to a life that has offered too little.
Special 26: the con dressed as a raid
Special 26 is remembered for its elegant premise: a gang posing as officials conducting high-profile raids, and the cat-and-mouse game that follows. The film's charm lies in its restraint - the cons are staged with paperwork and confidence rather than firepower. It is a reminder that the best Hindi heist films often work through character and nerve, a quality Chaar Yaar appears to be chasing with its four leads rather than a single mastermind.
Jewel Thief: the classic template
The Vijay Anand classic set the template that later crime films would refine, blending suspense, romance and a protagonist whose loyalties are deliberately hard to pin down. Its influence runs through nearly every Hindi thriller about stolen treasure and hidden identity that followed. For anyone revisiting the genre before Chaar Yaar, it is the natural starting point - the film that proved a heist could carry an entire evening of entertainment.
Ladies vs Ricky Bahl: when the con meets the crew
Closer in spirit to Chaar Yaar's ensemble energy, Ladies vs Ricky Bahl follows a group of women who join forces against a charming swindler. Its pleasure is the spectacle of women taking control of a situation built to exploit them - a theme that echoes across the premise of Chaar Yaar, in which four women accustomed to putting family first decide, briefly, to put themselves first.
Taken together, these six titles trace the many shapes the Hindi crime story has taken: the glossy chase, the intricate con, the everyday hustle and the ensemble revenge. Chaar Yaar enters that lineage with a lighter touch, framing its upheaval as a holiday that goes somewhere nobody planned. Whether audiences connect its four housewives to the genre's thieves and con artists, the film's central question - what happens when people who have always followed the rules decide to break them - is one Hindi cinema has been asking, in one form or another, for decades.
Source: Filmibeat
