All the likability in the world cannot quite overcome the predictability of a routine plot in Best of the Best, which follows a pair of young women, each of Southeast Asian descent, as they prepare for a nationwide dance competition. It is quite easy to like them, too, because you really believe, while watching director Lena Khan’s film, that Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) have been best friends for quite a long time. Part of that comes down to the actors, of course, but it’s also in the way the screenplay is as specific about what ties these two to each other’s hip as it is about what small insecurities might eventually lead to a falling-out.
There’s a little problem in such a statement, though, which is why, easy as it is to like Maya and Anjali (separately and together), it becomes a little difficult to have to criticize the way the story, written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, traps the two of them in a plot that consistently feels as if it’s a bit beneath their natural maturity level. There are only two possibilities as to why the filmmakers have done such a thing to two bright personalities like the main characters here, and one spends the running time hoping it’s one and not the other. The better option is that we’re not supposed to look down on these characters so much as we’re simply asked to turn off our brain when it comes to what they’ve been scripted to do.
A little optimism is never a bad thing, of course, although in this case, it might be misplaced if we are to adopt this first and better storytelling option. Maya and Anjali are very good dancers, though the beginning of the story finds them wanting to take a slightly different track than the infamy that has followed one of them from the last year of high school. The trouble that follows them still is an incident in which Maya, in mishandling a drone during a performance, was hit in the head by the flying electronic and nicknamed “Drone Strike” following a bit of social-media virality.
That’s the first sign that something between the friends will inevitably go wrong, because it accompanied a lot of other, unspoken insecurities within Maya about some of the inner contours in her friendship with Anjali. It only matters insofar as something must happen in this story, though, to further its minimal plot, which has the two join a dance troupe with a lot of eccentric personalities. In that way, the movie doesn’t quite escape the danger of being associated with at least one, but definitely two, different movie franchises—a series in which dancers have to step up and another one from later in which an a cappella group must retain perfect pitch.
They were defined by routine, of course, and so it goes with this one, especially when we meet the other students involved. The most important ones are Ronak (Ankur Rathee), the ruthless leader of the troupe who lords over every aspect of the dancers’ lives like he’s an efficiency-only tyrant, and the leader of the rival troupe (played by Neha Gundubogula), with whom Ronak has a steamy and complicated history. Oh, yeah: There’s also Harry (Nico Greetham), a white man with such knowledge of Indian culture that he speaks the Hindi language fluently and knows so many cultural references it puts the others to shame.
That’s pretty funny, or at least, it’s a little funnier than the appearances from Minhaj himself as a university official who keeps turning up to commit some Freudian slips in front of his female students. A little bit of interpersonal drama, such as a second catastrophe that plagues the two leads and a romantic subplot involving the apparently harmless Arjun (Chaneil Kular), comes along but doesn’t offer much interest. A lot of the appeal here is, of course, in the dance set pieces, although Khan doesn’t quite offer enough of them to appreciate more than the skill it takes to pull them off—let alone to be able to appreciate their choreographic diversity.
The movie is slightly better than that makes it sound, because Ramakrishnan and Kedia are so good here at trying to elevate moments like the big falling-out, a second and less expected inflaming of that argument, and the reconciliation, but that’s only if we adopt the more charitable view of the storytelling in Best of the Best. Then, there’s the other, more likely option, which is that the movie doesn’t quite trust its actors, its characters or its bits of silly comedy to elevate what is fundamentally routine and, ultimately, a bit too slight for its own good.
Rating: **½ (out of ****)
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