Director: Rajesh Krishnan
Writers: Nidhi Mehra, Mehul Suri
Cast: Tabu, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Kriti Sanon, Kapil Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh, Rajesh Sharma, Saswata Chatterjee
Duration: 123 minutes
Available in: Theatres
Crew revolves around the get-rich-quick adventures of three flight attendants – newbie Divya Rana (Kriti Sanon), mid-career Jasmine Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan) and veteran Geeta Sethi (Tabu) – who work for a commercial carrier named Kohinoor. Broke and sick of being middle-class, the women get involved in an elaborate gold-smuggling racket. The Kingfisher-Airlines-sized shadow looms large: The employees haven’t been paid for six months, there are rumours of bankruptcy and money laundering, ‘overweight’ air hostesses are grounded, and the chairman is a flamboyant billionaire named Vijay Walia. Given that fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya owned an IPL franchise called Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), it’s fitting that this frustrating heist caper becomes the cinematic manifestation of the men’s team: It’s packed with stars and wealth and endless promise, yet flatters to deceive. In other words, Crew is the kind of underachieving outfit that wins only on paper.
This cruel RCB analogy is another way of asking: How does a movie that pulls off the ultimate casting coup – Tabu and Kareena Kapoor Khan in the same frame, again and again – manage to fall flat? Is it even possible? It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between a disappointing film and a bad one. The former implies that it fails to live up to expectations of its own doing, and the latter implies that it fails on all metrics. Crew is more of the former of course, because it comes with baggage that spills out of its overhead cabins. Even the name of its director, Rajesh Krishnan, evokes visions of his genuinely witty debut film, Lootcase (2020). Crew is by no means unwatchable. It has a few decent gags; the best of them features a panicked character screaming “Horn maar!” in the cockpit while the aircraft barrels down a bumpy runway. But sometimes, this succumbing-to-the-pressure-of-expectations tag feels worse. You wonder why there aren’t more inventive moments like the one where the bobbing head of a newly dead man becomes a visual cue of a plane landing; you rue the almost-funny tone, the stiffness of the writing and the lost opportunities. The hope of what could have been hurts more than the superficial reality of what is.
