'Best of the Best' review: Came for the movie, stayed for the songs

The film Best of the Best (really made me question the person who named it, by the way) follows Maya and Anjali, two childhood best friends who end up at UCLA together. The two have spent most of their lives side by side, and now they have found themselves dealing with how to be cool in a new environment and lead a new life. They join the Bollywood dance club Agni, and things do not get simpler after that.

As the story progresses, the term “best friends” starts to feel a little too generous to describe Maya and Anjali. They are constantly making questionable decisions, hurting and misunderstanding each other. Somehow at the end of the day, they still find their way back to being friends. They are, essentially, two people who care about each other deeply but have absolutely no idea how to be good friends.

Played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Maya reminded me a lot of Devi Vishwakumar from Never Have I Ever. She belongs to the same archetype: academically brilliant, impulsive, chaotic, and capable of making perfectly manageable situations brilliantly worse. However, Maya is more culturally grounded than Devi, but this is not what makes the two characters inherently different. Devi is seen throughout to study a lot and freak out over scores, whereas Maya never does. She barely studies; in fact, there is not a single scene in the film that shows her studying, but somehow she manages to walk out with excellent scores. Give me a one-wish willow right now; I know what to wish for.

The film sprinkles their usual Gen Z vocabulary casually into conversations, with words like “lock in”, “goated”, and many more appearing along the way. None of it is outrageous or ridiculously out of place, but it does feel like the writers are trying hard to remind us now and then that the characters are young. It is not really bad enough to make you cringe, but it does not feel completely natural either.

The film is very determined to root itself in South Asian culture. For some reason, it seems to start and end with Bollywood. There are a few Kollywood songs thrown in here and there, almost as if someone remembered halfway through that South India exists too. This feels like a missed opportunity, since Maya is Tamil and Sri Lankan. There was plenty of room to explore that identity more specifically, instead of relying on the broad, familiar idea of South Asian culture.

Also, can we PLEASE stop pretending Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is ugly?

Why is she constantly being given characters who belong to the “she is supposedly unattractive but really good at studies” category? Maitreyi is gorgeous. Like, distractingly gorgeous. My eyes were glued to her throughout the film, and I can assure you it was not because I was particularly invested in the plot at that point. The entire premise that Maya needs to be presented as some conventionally undesirable academic girl feels increasingly difficult to buy when the person playing her looks like Maitreyi Ramakrishnan.

Then came the scene that nearly broke me, making me question my entire existence: two white men arguing in Hindi.

I genuinely have no clue what happened there. I don't know who approved it, who watched it back, or who sat through the final edit and thought, “Yes, this fits in; it should be in the final cut.” The entire ordeal was so awkward that I reached a strange point where I could no longer decide whether I hated the scene with a passion or loved it ironically. It was so bad that it became entertaining. Cinema is mysterious like that.

One of the film’s most enjoyable elements, though, is its song selection. Best of the Best throws in tracks such as Enjoy Enjaami, Tujhe Dekha To, Tu Meri, Baazigar O Baazigar, I Like the Way You Kiss Me, and Big Dawgs, among others. In other words, it has basically assembled the soundtrack I would want playing while deep-cleaning my room at 2 pm on a Sunday after deciding that my life needs to be reorganised.

The music choices are not always quite as successful when they become part of the background score. There are several scenes where people are fighting, and the background suddenly erupts into tabla. Why? What exactly are we communicating here? Is the tabla meant to make the scene more culturally authentic? Does every South Asian argument automatically come with live percussion? At one point, I was paying more attention to the tabla than to the actual fight.

Several scenes also veer so far into cringe territory that I physically recoiled from the screen. Not metaphorically. Physically. There is a particular kind of second-hand embarrassment where you suddenly become extremely interested in looking anywhere except at the television, and this film manages to find that feeling more than once.

By the end, Best of the Best feels much easier to tolerate than to love. It has its moments, a great playlist, a beautiful lead, and enough ridiculous scenes to provide accidental entertainment. It ultimately lands somewhere in the territory of a barely bearable one-time watch.

At least I got a playlist out of it.

Film: Best of the Best

Director: Lena Khan

Cast: Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Priyanka Kedia, Hasan Minhaj, Nico Greetham

Rating: 2.5/5