Crew: Tabu, Kareena Kapoor, Kriti Sanon Starrer Crash Lands On Cue

RAJESH A KRISHNAN’s Crew, a heist comedy, is too taken with its cast. On paper, this makes sense. The film stars Tabu, Kareena Kapoor and Kriti Sanon — three leading female actors whose coming together in a film thrives with promise and challenges the marketing norms which tout male actors as more feasible. Logistically too this feels like a rarity. All of them are commercially viable and tied up with individual projects, making a joint venture such as this a singular proposition. But in doing that, the outing commits the cardinal sin: it forgets to have fun.

As a result, most things feel manufactured. When the characters are having a good time, they show that they are having a good time. Alcohol spills from bottles and they look into the camera and steal a smile. When they are scared of getting caught, they nervously twitch as their gaze meets ours. And when things go awry, someone’s grandfather dies and another loses her car. A lot in Crew is for show, but tragically there is little to tell.

It is impossible to specify this failing and not circle back to the actors because the film has managed a casting coup. The three leading actors are terrific in their own way and bring genuine chemistry together. The roles are well-defined. Tabu plays Geeta Sethi, a former beauty queen who is stuck in a job that is withholding her provident fund (PF); Kareena Kapoor Khan is Jasmine Kohli, an astute businesswoman who has bigger dreams than her eyes can accommodate; and Kriti Sanon is Divya Rana, a topper from Haryana who is living a lie before her parents. All of them share two things: the desire for a better life, and a profession that does not pay.

Written by Nidhi Mehra and Mehul Suri, Crew’s inspiration from reality is hard to miss. Geeta, Jasmine and Divya are air-hostesses at Kohinoor airline that has held off their payment. The owner’s name is Vijay Walia (Saswata Chatterjee gleefully embracing the excess of the role) and he flees the country as soon as his company nosedives into bankruptcy. His abscondment leaves the staff in a state of distress and our lead trio in a fit of rage. On not receiving their salaries, they had resorted to gold smuggling across countries but its discontinuation overlapped with being laid off. With Walia decamping in Al Burj (a fictional place that looks like Dubai and was shot there), Geeta, Jasmine and Divya are convinced that their lives will no longer improve till one of them comes up with a plan.

Krishnan, who had previously made the assured and funny Lootcase, relies too heavily on the ingenuity of the casting to do much with it. One gag follows another (the best ones feature in the trailer and there is a hilarious moment featuring Diljit Dosanjh, a customs officer here, when he realises on a date that it is a dry day) as some land and some don’t. But the nagging feeling while watching Crew is the film not duly mining the sheer potential of the setting and the actors. This is not to say that the sight of women having fun makes it frivolous but that the outing does not wholeheartedly commit to this frivolity. And that is the problem.

It is all fun and games to see three actors looking smashing in scene after scene (Tabu opting for a stunning off-shoulder dress right after the airline closes down is honestly #UnemploymentGoals) but it is hard to not imagine them doing what they do best with better writing, sharper humour and more candour. In the second half (which includes the heist), scenes unravel on a sort of autopilot, which makes the film watchable but also disrupts its appeal.

There is also the problem of logic. Not unlike Lootcase, the idea of middle-class aspiration is embedded within the premise of Crew. But the makers imagine it in some lofty terms which comes across as a blindspot of rich people (tellingly Tabu’s character repeatedly compares her job of an airhostess to a househelp — bai). When Geeta, Jasmine and Divya plan a trip to Al Burj but lack the money, we are made to believe that cash from selling one Louis Vuitton bag suffices in funding it. In a moment of crisis, Divya requests her younger brother to help her with a hacking task but nothing to support this skill of his is provided by the film before that. Even a host of subplots (like Geeta’s alcoholic brother and his wife, an airline support staff who Jasmine is on good terms with) feel reverse-engineered to help in the impending resolution.

One can cite these as nitpicking in a film that does not overtly concern itself with much rationale. And perhaps it is, but the fact that I found myself more worried about these issues even when Tabu, Kareena and Kriti were on screen speaks more about Crew than about me. A pivotal moment in the film is scored to ‘Choli Ke Peeche’, the provocative 1993 Ila Arun song that made an entire generation grow up overnight. The irony is for a film that espouses its redux (and a very catchy Diljit number at that), Crew shares none of its gall.