Crew is a bumpy yet fun cinematic ride with lots of laughter and amazing performances. The leading ladies are air hostesses Kriti Sanon (who plays newbie Divya Rana), Tabu as middle-aged and senior most Geeta Sethi and Kareena Kapoor Khan as mid-career Jasmine Kohli. These women make a brilliant trio for a heist and also in the film’s cast. The plot revolves around them getting voluntarily involved in a gold smuggling racket after giving up on living a middle-class life due to each one of them facing a financial issue.
This is the second film of the director Rajesh Krishnan after his debut with Lootcase in 2020. Loocase was a black comedy and also revolved around money, a gangster and a middle-class man. If I am not mistaken, Crew is the first heist-comedy in Bollywood with female characters in the lead.
The narrative has some interesting and memorable comic scenes, but we don’t get them often. In a scene, when the pilot lands the plane on a bumpy runaway and when the plane barrels on it, a character reacts in panic and screams, “Horn Maar!” in the cockpit. There are more of this kind of jokes which land smoothly in every scene. But, I couldn’t resist saying that Crew lacks uniqueness when it comes to writing. A lot of narrative seems to be inspired by Vijay Mallya’s case. In the film, the airline where these air hostesses work is named “Kohinoor.” The delayed payments of the employees, bankruptcy rumours and the chairman of the company, coincidently named “Vijay” Walia eloping to another country.
The writers Nidhi Mehra and Mehul Suri work pretty well on the dialogues. Kareena and Tabu get the best lines to speak. In a scene, Geeta (Tabu) who was once Miss Karnal says, “beauty queen se bai kab bani, pata hi nahi chala.”
I loved the lead and the supporting cast, which included Kapil Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh (in an extended cameo), Rajesh Sharma, and amazing Shaswata Chatterjee and it was a pleasure to see Kulbhushan Kharbanda on the big screen after a long time. The costumes designed for the crew had catchy colours and added glam to the graceful performances that these wonderful actresses gave. The way each of them was styled was a well-done job by Manisha Melwani, Chandini Wabhi, and Meagan Concessio.
The worst part of the film is the brand advertisements in the scenes which restrain us from delving into the narrative and ruin the experience. And, the makers have already destroyed the nostalgia by remixing the “Choli Ke Peeche” and I never get the idea of doing that especially when the song does not fit in the narrative and is misplaced just for the sake of doing so.
Crew could have been better if the makers had built a better narrative for the heist comedy as they had the privilege of getting three dazzling actresses on board, each of them alone can hook us to the screen for a long time. As a commonly found phrase on social media, these actresses ‘ate and left no crumbs.’
You can watch Crew at your nearby theatres.
