Best of the Best: A Review

Deliciously campy. An absolute riot.

I had it noted on the calendar. I waited until everyone was in bed before I could start it. A part of me braced for the cringe, for the letdown.

The film starts with a montage of archival childhood videos. We meet Maya and Anjali, besties since childhood, also bound to UCLA Comp Sci (what else?). The dorm move-in comes replete with Asian parenting tropes and ends in a resounding slap. This was probably the low point of the movie. I get the single mom, the disappointed parent, the crucible that parent-child relationship was born from. There could have been other ways to make that trope work. This one fell flat.

The movie got better and better. I was entertained the whole two hours. The cast was fantastic, each dance crew member jostling for attention without attempting to claim lead space. The film knows how to laugh at itself. Hasan Minhaj co-wrote it, and it shows. The music, a blast. The Tamil numbers had me sitting up. It isn’t often Tamil cinema gets the nod. I could see Maitreyi‘s stamp on the film.

As a campy college teen movie, this one checks all the boxes. This is also a movie I will watch with my kids.

Then, the stuff that has my brain humming hours after watching. The representation. The gloriously done representation. Brown bodies everywhere. Unapologetically, brazenly brown and desi. The dialogues crackling. My favorite is every scene with Maya and Arjun in it. They were on fire. Quick, witty and, just the right amount of nerdy.

The best part though, the friendship between Maya and Anjali. The ride-or-die friendship that gets tested. We see Maya swallow back what she is about to say when Anjali’s face lights up. We watch Anjali shrink when she realizes her opportunity, the one that let her shine, was borrowed. The hurt on both sides, the freeze and the thaw. Uff! This is one of those on-screen relationships I will remember for a long time.

There are no true villains in this film. Except the ones we grapple with ourselves. Our inherited selves.

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