Best of the Best knows exactly what kind of movie it is. That is both its greatest strength and, occasionally, its biggest limitation. Lena Khan‘s new Netflix comedy has no interest in pretending that a college dance competition is a matter of life and death. There are no tortured speeches about destiny, no manufactured sense that a trophy will determine the characters’ entire futures, and no desperate attempt to turn a familiar underdog story into something profound. Instead, the film understands that the real drama is happening somewhere else: in the uncomfortable space between who you were when a friendship began and who you become when you finally get the opportunity to grow beyond it. That is a much better idea than the competition itself, although Best of the Best doesn’t always know what to do with it.
The screenplay, by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, is at its sharpest when it refuses to make Maya and Anjali easy to categorize. Maya is ambitious, intelligent and frequently right about the problems around her. She is also so convinced of her own intelligence that she has trouble recognizing when being right isn’t the same thing as being considerate. Anjali, meanwhile, isn’t simply the sweet, overlooked friend waiting for her big moment. Her passivity has consequences of its own, particularly when resentment becomes easier than confrontation. That makes their relationship far more compelling than the film’s external conflict. Unfortunately, the screenplay sometimes seems to realize this only halfway through the movie.
The friendship is messy in ways that feel recognizable, but the film occasionally resolves tensions too neatly after spending considerable time establishing how complicated they are. There are moments when a sharper screenplay might have allowed a disagreement to remain unresolved, or let a character make a genuinely unforgivable mistake rather than quickly steering everyone toward emotional catharsis. Best of the Best wants its characters to be flawed, but it still wants the audience to feel comfortable with them. That instinct keeps the film accessible. It also keeps it from becoming as incisive as it could have been.
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is particularly good at playing Maya’s contradictions. She doesn’t soften the character’s more irritating qualities just to make her easier to root for. Maya can be funny, charismatic and perceptive in one scene and completely oblivious to how exhausting she is in the next. Ramakrishnan understands that those qualities aren’t contradictions so much as two sides of the same personality.
Priyanka Kedia has the more difficult task because Anjali’s conflict is internal for much of the film. She has to communicate the accumulation of small frustrations rather than simply announcing that she feels overshadowed. Kedia gives those moments enough restraint that when Anjali finally pushes back, it feels like something that has been building for a long time rather than a plot twist inserted to create conflict. Their chemistry is arguably the film’s most convincing special effect.
The problem is that the rest of the ensemble isn’t given the same attention. Several supporting characters function primarily as extensions of the central conflict, and the movie moves on before they can become anything more than recognizable types. Ankur Rathee’s Ronak, for instance, is positioned as someone whose artistic philosophy clashes with Maya’s, but the film doesn’t spend enough time interrogating either perspective to make their disagreement particularly revealing. Hasan Minhaj gets some of the funniest material as Hamza, but the character often feels like a comedic pressure valve rather than an essential part of the story. This becomes particularly noticeable because the film’s world is otherwise one of its most appealing elements.
Best of the Best is culturally specific without turning that specificity into an explanatory exercise. Its South Asian identity isn’t treated as a lesson for an imagined outsider audience. It is simply part of the characters’ lives, relationships and sense of humor. That gives the comedy a texture that the more conventional parts of the screenplay sometimes lack.
The jokes are similarly strongest when they emerge from character rather than from the script announcing that it is being funny. There is a nice irreverence to the film, particularly in the way it treats college politics and the personalities involved in the dance team. It doesn’t constantly reach for a punchline, which allows some of the humor to land more naturally.
Then there is the dancing. For a movie built around a competitive dance team, Best of the Best has a surprisingly uneven relationship with spectacle. Some routines have the speed, precision and visual rhythm necessary to make you understand why these performances matter to the characters. Others feel more functional than thrilling. The Bollywood-fusion premise gives the filmmakers plenty to work with, but not every number takes advantage of it.
The final performance is the clearest example. It is perfectly watchable, but the movie has spent so much time telling us that this routine is supposed to represent a new direction that the eventual payoff doesn’t quite match the ambition behind it. The choreography is polished, yet there is a difference between watching a technically competent routine and feeling that you’ve just witnessed something extraordinary. That distinction matters in a dance movie.
Khan’s direction is more confident with people than with spectacle. She has a good instinct for awkward pauses, small reactions and the uncomfortable comedy of people who know each other too well. The movie’s best scenes don’t require a dance floor at all. They work because the characters are finally saying things they have been avoiding.
That also explains why the film’s predictable structure isn’t as damaging as it could have been. You can anticipate many of the major beats long before they happen. The question is rarely what will happen next. It is whether the actors can make the familiar material feel specific enough to justify getting there. For the most part, they can.
There is a strange misconception that predictable automatically means bad. It doesn’t. Familiarity only becomes a problem when a film has nothing else to offer. Best of the Best has enough personality to survive its conventional structure, but not quite enough invention to transcend it. That is ultimately where the movie lands: enjoyable, likable and occasionally sharper than its lightweight premise suggests, but also frustratingly close to being something more substantial.
Its most interesting idea is that growing up can make a friendship feel less like a permanent home and more like a place you have to renegotiate. That is richer territory than the usual lessons about teamwork and believing in yourself. Whenever Best of the Best trusts that idea, it becomes genuinely affecting. Whenever it retreats into the safer mechanics of the genre, it becomes merely pleasant.
Still, there is value in a movie that doesn’t confuse being sincere with being sentimental. Best of the Best isn’t trying to convince us that winning matters more than everything else. It is interested in what happens when two people who have always defined themselves together finally have to discover who they are apart. The trophy is just the excuse. And while the movie doesn’t always give that idea the complexity it deserves, Ramakrishnan and Kedia give it enough life to make the journey worthwhile.
