Cast: Tabu, Kriti Sanon, Diljit Dosanjh, Kapil Sharma, Kareena Kapoor, Rajesh Sharma
Director: Rajesh Krishnan
Rating: 4.5/5
The Rajesh Krishnan movie isn’t very fantastic, yet it would be unfair to label it as mediocre. Its script, music, and the friendship between its three incredibly entertaining and brilliant protagonists, however, make it an achievement.
It tells the story of three air hostesses who work for Kohinoor, a failing airline whose millionaire owner Vijay Walia (cough, no relation to anybody actual) is about to depart the country: Geeta (Tabu), Jasmin (Kareena Kapoor), and Divya (Kriti Sanon). The main plot of Crew is how these three regular ladies end up in the heart of a gold smuggling enterprise and how they use it to their advantage.
One may characterise Crew as a crime movie. However, it is not a very complicated one when compared to Ocean’s Eleven or even Dhoom. Our females are not being helped by tech-savvy geniuses or clever strategies to accomplish this hard task. There isn’t any activity that flies. The robbery and, more crucially, the comedy in this movie are more akin to Rajkumar Santoshi than Mission Impossible. Crew is enjoyable to see because of its simplicity. It gives it a grounded sense of realism and heightens the sense of the stakes.
Putting women in awkward situations on TV is never easy. Women’s roles have always been subject to a kind of Maryaada barrier imposed by society. It’s cool if males commit heists. It is morally dubious when done by women. Crew turns it around, making everything lighthearted, harmless, and hip. They even defend this “crime” as necessary for the greater good. And it succeeds in doing so in the only manner possible: by evoking empathy for these people and their issues. These women are just desperate, upset, and furious at a system that allows the wealthy to get away with things; they are neither bad nor even bed.
The three protagonists in Crew impeccable, amazing, and breathtakingly beautiful are its central characters. Saying that Tabu is fantastic would be like listening to a broken record. Here, the actress pulls off what she has done numerous times before: she masterfully combines humour with strength, vulnerability, and style in a way that is uniquely Tabu. Remind yourself why Kareena Kapoor conquered Bollywood. She gives Jasmin a conceited, distant, yet endearing quality that puts her squarely in the centre of the Poo-Geet continuum. She once again kills the emotional sequences, and her comedic timing is impeccable. In the presence of these formidable women, Kriti Sanon has more than held her own. She demonstrates that Mimi was no overnight sensation, matching her elders’ sense of humour.
But what drives Crew is not just the three of them individually; it’s their cohesiveness as a team. The three perform so brilliantly together that it’s hard to believe they have been friends off-screen for years. They practically act as the movie’s only protagonists. That’s chemistry right there. In a delightful supporting role, Diljit Dosanjh uses his charisma and off-screen demeanour to create a lively figure. Without any one-liners or laughs, Kapil Sharma stuns with a serious performance in which he manages to wow. The outstanding supporting casts are completed by Rajesh Sharma and Charu Shankar, whose calculated comedy may be used for a chemical experiment.
It’s not as though Crew is perfect. The cops don’t know what they’re doing, the narrative is predictable, and the heroines have as thick of a plot armour as a vault. The conclusion is very simplistic, and there are several logical errors. However, one cannot commend its simplicity in one context and criticise it in another. When it seems like it makes things too simple, one must ignore Crew’s simplicity, which serves to support the act as light entertainment. Perhaps because we’ve seen so many very intricate heist dramas, this one seems overly straightforward. But that’s just an observation, not a complaint.
Bravo to filmmaker Rajesh Krishnan for creating a movie that transports you back in time to a simpler era when comedy didn’t have to be “clever,” storytelling could be straightforward, and evil could be good without moral reasoning. It’s amazing how skillfully he handles this in the post-OTT world. Moviegoers and our business alike require more Crew-like films.
