Gym memberships can be a LOT of money. But in the winter in Chicago, you still have to find ways to work out when it’s -15 degrees outside. Most people do yoga or buy weight equipment? Me? I dance to YouTube dance videos. The Best of the Best are the Bollywood dance videos, high energy but very doable if you don’t have Shakira hips for salsa like myself. The infectious energy of those videos is all over Netflix’s latest, a smile maker beginning to end.
After an unfortunate “drone strike” during their Hollywood dance routine, best friends Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) are ready for a fresh start at UCLA. First night they go to the South Asian Student Association (SASA) Mixer. There, the hypnotic dancing of lead Ronak (Ankur Rathee) lures the BFFs into the dance group. As you might expect, dance formations take hella practice, and cause hella friction, threatening the girls friendships and in Anjali’s case, possibly her academic future at UCLA.
Hasan Minhaj’s simple one act pitch was “South Asian Pitch Perfect“, and he sticks to that to a T. For any non Asians out there, this formula is the tried and true grounding Best of the Best sits on. Every movie best friends has one Maya and one Anjali, a line you can trace back to Pinto and Flounder in Animal House. There’s the token race paricipant, in this case a white guy (Nico Greetham), impossibly awesome love interest (Chaneil Kular), an overbearing parent (Janina Gavankar), a queen bee (Ronak) to topple, stuff you recognize. But that’s the extent of Best of the Best’s stereotyping. The reason the movie’s so fun is how committed it is to its very specific South Asian cast. The minute at the SASA mixer we see co-President Indian and Pakistani Americans bickering like a toxic college couple, I knew I was in good hands. Anchoring the story, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia are a terrific twosome. Ramakrishnan has had “it” since Never Have I Ever, and continues to show why she deserves leading roles here, wisecracking and commanding a room like any great comedian ever could. Kedia has her coming out party here, having a blast playing the sidekick thrust into the spotlight, delightfully daffy in all the right ways. Chaneil Kular’s love interest and Janina Gankar’s helicopter are also specifically enough drawn that they rise out of their types almost immediately. Hell even Ankur Rathee’s Konak has layers I didn’t see coming. Hasan Minhaj’s script makes sure each character actually has a chance to be one even in some little way, but underneath it is a community that is forever and always pulling for each other, keeping this thing on the tracks and never really veering too much into acidic toxicity that could torpedo Best of the Best.
But the movie falls apart of the dancing isn’t exciting. Thankfully, Lena Khan does a great job nailing the performances. They are polished and slick, but not in a way that makes you not believe a college kid put them together. The opening drone sequence gets ready for what we’re gonna watch, something familiar but new, maybe with a great sight gag or two. My favorite sequence is at a frat party, incorporating beer pong into dance in a way I’ve never seen before. The big “dance mishap” we get ends wonderfully chaotically. And the big final dance number is legitimately exciting and makes you want to rise off the couch and bop along with the grooves. Khan even gives us a couple fun Bollywoody fantasies here and there too.
And when you combine infectious dance sequences with characters you’ve never seen and are rooting for, you have the double ingredient recipe for college movie success! Best of the Best doesn’t quite get to it’s title, but I’d happily put it into the college movie canon, especially for the modern era, sorely lacking in every way. Hasan, I’d love just a UCLA non dancing spinoff too please? Maybe make the movie about the Pakistani/Hindi co-presidents of the SASA? There’s a fun acidic very spicy vindaloo in there somewhere. That’s the best I can do as the token white guy supporting your movie.