Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) have been best friends and dance partners since childhood. When they end up at the same college, they join Agni, a fiercely competitive dance club run by Ronak (Ankur Rathee), who has one goal: winning the national Best of the Best competition.
Directed by Lena Khan, ‘Best of the Best’ is a pretty formulaic American dance film, except for its focus on the South Asian diaspora and its fun Bollywood tone. Screenwriters Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam also throw in a mild variation by presenting Agni as a dance group that usually wins the Best of the Best trophy, so they aren’t the typical underdogs. Except that the ambitious, inventive Maya, who doesn’t like being a team player, scuttles the group’s chances in the qualifier rounds with a prop mishap.
While winning the competition is obviously the primary goal of the story, Best of the Best also follows Maya and Anjali’s friendship as it faces new challenges when Anjali is selected to be the lead dancer, even though she isn’t nearly as passionate about the whole thing as Maya. Anjali is completely smitten with Ronak, while Maya is too busy being a bit of a headstrong wrecking ball.
In one of the funniest sequences of the film, when the girls watch Team Agni perform during welcome week, Anjali fantasizes about being in a Bollywood romance number with Ronak, while Maya hilariously dreams about simply being the lead star of the group. It’s an entertaining way of establishing their personalities and goals without having them say it out loud.
Thankfully, the romance is kept fairly thin in this dance film, although Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s Maya has instant chemistry with a nerdy but charming sophomore called Arjun (Chaneil Kular), someone she sort of knows from before and meets again at the freshman party. Both Maitreyi and Priyanka Kedia are delightful as best friends and are believably quick to forgive each other each time one of them does something shitty. In a not very convincing trope, Maya is projected as the “not very attractive one”, while the pretty Anjali wins everybody over instantly, although keeping up with her college grades is a different matter.
A lot of the song choices in Best of the Best are fun, ranging from the wildly popular “Ghungroo” from the Hrithik Roshan film War to the Tamil chartbuster “Enjoy Enjaami” by Dhee and Arivu. The film is bursting with recognizable tracks. However, the dance energy feels weirdly off. The choreography doesn’t stand out much, and some of that is also the screenplay’s fault. In the finale, you barely get to see leads Maya and Anjali dancing before a contrived twist finally gives them their moment to shine.
Step Up 2 came out ages ago, and even though I barely remember anything about the story, I can still picture that rain-soaked final dance battle playing out to Timbaland’s “Bounce”, with its distorted industrial beats and pumped up choreography. That’s the kind of lasting impression a great dance sequence can leave, and it’s what Best of the Best is missing. The film does bring a colorful Bollywood vibe to the familiar dance-battle formula, but even its inventive final face-off never quite delivers a sequence you’ll still be thinking about years later. I literally saw the film than 24 hours before writing this review but already do not remember the song that played in the finale.
Still, Best of the Best is a fun time watch. give the film its warmth. The dancing may not leave much of an impression, but Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia as Maya and Anjali certainly do.
Watch ‘Best of the Best’ on Netflix.
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