Director: Rajesh A. Krishnan
Writers: Nidhi Mehra, Mehul Suri
Cast: Tabu, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Kriti Sanon, Kapil Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh, Trupti Khamkar
Opening Frame
Crew opens on a gleaming city skyline — glamorous, aspirational, and faintly hollow, much like the world its characters inhabit. The pulsating opening number, Koo Koo, establishes its tone immediately: loud, stylish, unapologetically commercial.
Three flight attendants from a failing private airline, Kohinoor, find themselves broke and desperate. When a dead body and a stash of smuggled gold land in their laps, they slide into crime — first hesitantly, then with delight. What follows is a glittery, improbable string of heists and cover-ups — sometimes funny, often too convenient.
Beneath all the sequins lies a film that wants to be both satire and sisterhood — a caper about capitalism and female rebellion. The question is, how well does it fly?
What Works
1. Performances and Star Power
The film’s most consistent strength is its trio of leads. Kareena Kapoor Khan brings effortless sass to Jasmine, her timing razor-sharp and her irony intact. Tabu anchors the trio with quiet dignity as Geeta, the grounded senior struggling against age, hierarchy, and debt. Kriti Sanon, as Divya, plays the wide-eyed dreamer with sincerity, though her arc remains the least developed.
Together, the three share rare, lived-in chemistry. Their friendship feels easy, unthreatened, and uncompetitive — a welcome departure from Bollywood’s tendency to reduce women to foils or rivals. The film also acknowledges their age dynamics with unusual self-awareness — no desperate attempts at agelessness here.
But the true scene-stealer is Trupti Khamkar as SI Mala. Each time she appears, the film’s pulse sharpens. Funny, unpredictable, and full of unstudied charisma, she’s the only character who feels both real and heightened — a tonal balance the film itself often struggles to maintain.
2. Feminist Undercurrent (Light but Intentional)
There’s a subtle anti-patriarchal hum beneath the surface comedy:
- Geeta is patronised by her husband and male bosses until she breaks free of both.
- Jasmine pickpockets without guilt — rejecting the heroine-as-moral-anchor cliché.
- Divya’s dream of becoming a pilot sits neatly in a world that refuses to let women steer.
- When a passenger slaps her casually, she twists his arm without hesitation — and later, when a male superior says, “Yeh ladies log ka kaam nahi hai,” she gives him the same treatment.
These gestures may be simplistic, but they’re consistent with the film’s tone: rebellion as glamour, protest as punchline.
3. Visual Tone and Design
The film uses its production design cleverly. The women’s professional world — airports, lounges, aircraft cabins — glows in saturated colour and surface sheen, while their personal lives are pale and underlit. The contrast is deliberate: the illusion of luxury versus the exhaustion of reality.
There’s no pretence of realism. Crew wears its formalism proudly — a candy-coated satire aware of its own artificiality. Its aesthetic grammar owes as much to Mean Girls and Money Heist as to any Hindi comedy.
What Doesn’t — The Seven Sins of Crew
1. Predictable and Convenient Plotting
The heists, which should be the film’s narrative engines, unfold with surprising ease. Airport security, customs, police — all dissolve on cue. The thrill is replaced by convenience.
As every screenwriting manual reminds us, “Use coincidence to get your characters into trouble, never to get them out of it.” Crew does the opposite — almost proudly.
2. Weak Subplots
The romantic threads — Kapil Sharma with Tabu, Diljit Dosanjh with Kriti Sanon — feel perfunctory, adding neither tension nor texture. Crewroom banter, a natural space for character insight or humour, is left underexplored. The script would have benefitted from narrowing its focus: one core plot, sharpened and deepened, rather than several loose threads competing for attention.
3. Unreal World-Building
Crew constructs a world too slick to believe in. Every crisis resolves neatly, every obstacle melts away. The tonal excess is intentional, but the lack of grounding erodes stakes. If Jasmine is broke, how does she afford couture dresses? Why does Geeta’s “financially strained” home look like a magazine spread? Even stylised worlds need internal logic — here, spectacle replaces credibility.
4. Passive Protagonists
Despite its feminist pitch, the film rarely lets its women act with agency. The smuggling plot arrives by coincidence; the heist unfolds by luck. Only Jasmine occasionally drives the story forward. The others drift — reacting, not choosing.
As Robert McKee says, “True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure.” These women don’t make choices; the plot makes them on their behalf. Without genuine decision-making, their rebellion feels decorative rather than transformative.
5. Product Placement Overload
The film’s glamour is undercut by its relentless brand visibility. From cosmetics to gadgets, the screen is a catalogue. Product placement, when done well, feels like texture; here, it feels like transaction. The satire on capitalism risks irony fatigue when the frame itself becomes a billboard.
6. The Phone Lock Loophole
A key plot point hinges on unlocking a dead man’s phone — an action the screenplay never bothers to justify. In a film so driven by devices, this oversight is glaring. A single shot or throwaway line could have solved it. Instead, logic gives way to convenience — again.
7. The Unused Pilot Backstory
Divya’s subplot — lying to her family about being a pilot — is introduced but never explored. It’s an implausible premise begging for either humour or consequence. A middle-class girl pretending to be a pilot is rich material: deception, ambition, and pressure. Yet the film uses it as backstory, not narrative. Ironically, the skill of maintaining such a lie could have made her the brains behind the heist — but Crew prefers sparkle over sense.
Closing Reflection
Crew is an entertaining flight with a sparkling cast and a sincere undercurrent of feminist intent. But under its wit and wardrobe lies a screenplay too dependent on coincidence and surface rebellion. The film gestures toward female agency without building it from character or choice.
It’s a ride powered by performance and polish but short on propulsion. The turbulence remains external, never emotional.
— Ankit
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