Rajesh A. Krishnan’s Crew is a wonderful comedy starring three actresses delivering impeccable performances and showing us a taste of female camaraderie in the Bollywood industry. While we desperately wait for Zoya’s dream project starring Alia, Priyanka, and Katrina (which seems to be a closed book now), we get a comical heist film with Tabu, Kareena Kapoor Khan, and Kriti Sanon, who lighten the cinema screen with their presence. The film follows air hostesses from a fictional Kohinoor Airlines who are fed up with being treated as doormats and choose to take matters into their own hands after a strange incident occurs on one of their flights. This is a comedic heist film that’s packed with hilarious innuendo and good-natured laughs from start to finish. Though two hours long in typical Bollywood fashion, the movie never lags and keeps a quick pace from start to finish. A formulaic Bollywood film that simply does it right, let’s get into what happens in Crew.
Spoiler Alert
Why does the crew get caught?
Crew movie begins with a flight being stopped before take-off because rumor has it there are three women on it trying to smuggle gold to the glitzy city of Al Burj (a more glamorous Dubai?). Diya, Geeta, and Jasmine, all part of the same crew, are escorted off the flight for interrogation. After all of their belongings are thoroughly checked and the women are frisked, there’s no gold found anywhere. The three women are hard-working flight attendants at the prestigious Kohinoor Airlines (you know, Kingfisher). Though they’ve been working relentlessly, getting harassed on flights, flying day in and day out, and asking the same question 100 times, “veg or non-veg?” there have been no payments for 6 months. The crew is fed up with the situation, and everybody is struggling with money matters. Divya was meant to be a pilot but never got the job because of a terrible economy and instead decided to fly hostess style. In the meantime, Jasmine, who was brought up by her granddad, had big dreams of running her own skincare brand but failed to get funding because, to make money, you have to have money (preach it, girl!). Finally, Geeta’s husband had a restaurant with a friend, which went under, and so she ended up becoming a flight attendant, only getting the job at her old age because she was Miss Karnal ‘81.
Soon, even their daily allowances are reduced, and it’s almost as if the crew is living on scraps. However, Rajvanshi tells the gang that they should simply trust in their chairman, Vijay Waliya (I love this). On the news, Mr. Waliya tells the world that he’s taking good care of his small family of 4000 at Kohinoor; however, internally, everybody is struggling miserably. Divya has a loan to pay off, Geeta wants to start a restaurant in Goa with her husband, and Jasmine needs funding for her skincare brand. It appears Rajvanshi is quite sick all the time, and one day he gets grounded on the flight. The three women are with him, and in an attempt to try and do CPR, Geeta opens up his shirt to find bars of gold strapped to his body. There’s no way Rajvanshi is going to wake up ever again, but Jasmine suggests they steal some for themselves, and all their problems will be solved. Obviously, this is a terrible idea, so Geeta and Divya immediately shut it down. The flight returns home for an emergency landing, and the DRA finds the gold with Rajvanshi. They try to investigate it, but with the man dead, they don’t have many answers. A little while later, news breaks out that Kohinoor is bankrupt. This is when Jasmine’s idea suddenly sounds good to the women, and they make a new plan.
Three months prior to getting caught, the women realize that Manoj Mittal is the brain behind the gold and decide to team up with him to do what Rajvanshi was doing for him earlier. While he thinks it’s not a job women can do, Divya uses her brute strength to show him how capable they are. It works, and now they’re the new smuggling crew for Mittal Enterprises. Unlike Rajvanshi, the women can’t carry the gold on their person, so they melt the gold and create chocolate balls out of them, packing them up like a fresh box of Valentine’s Day specials for their travels. It works criminally well for a little while until DRA inspector Mala gets a whiff of what they’re doing. Immediately, Divya looks like she’s caught with her hand in the cookie jar, exciting Mala. However, lucky for them, customs officer Jaiveer, who happens to have the hots for Divya, shows up right on time to save them.
Who Gets the Crew Caught?
At the beginning of Crew movie, Jasmine talks about how people say those with money are never happy and those who are happy never have money. However, at this moment, it becomes very evident that the three women are over the moon. Money can buy you happiness, folks. Everything seems to be going wonderfully until the present day, when the crew learns that there’s going to be a surprise check. Apparently, Mala has received intel that the three women are smuggling gold to Al Burj. Now, in the present day, she tries her best to get the women to talk and tell her where they’ve hidden the gold, but it simply doesn’t come through. Though they’re held for 6 hours, nothing is found in the chocolates, and the women are let go. It seems Divya’s pilot training came in handy, and they hid the gold in the roof of the plane. However, the plane leaves with the gold in it. Getting caught makes the women rethink their whole situation, and it causes a rift between the three of them. Suddenly everything comes crashing down all at once. Unfortunately, Jasmine loses her grandfather as well. The high never lasts, and finally, it’s revealed to the whole world that Kohinoor is bankrupt. On TV the girls see their colleagues talk about their hardships and immediately rush to be with them. However, they’re met with disdain instead of open arms, because their friends know what they’ve been up to. All this while, the girls had thought that the tip was given by Komal, one of their fellow attendants who found them partying it up just two nights before they were caught; however, she says she never told anybody.
The girls put two and two together and realize it was Mittal’s wife, who was an ex-flight attendant, who was the one who ratted them out. They find her, and she reveals she wanted her husband to rot in jail because he’s a pervert who has found a third wife and is living it up in Al Burj. She wanted to teach him a lesson, but the women got caught in between. However, now they know that he’s just a servant, and the real master is Waliya, sitting in Al Burj on a mountain of gold, getting ready to marry off his daughter.
What Happens To Divya, Geeta And Jasmine?
A dog always knows where his owner is, so all they need to do is follow Mittal and Waliya will materialize in front of them. With the help of Mittal’s wife the women learn where he is in Al Burj and go there themselves. Seeing as 4000 people have been left to hang dry, the women suddenly feel like terrible people and want to do something to make the poor rich and the rich poor (or something like that). They plan a heist to break into the fanciest hotel in Al Burj, where the wedding will take place, by dressing up as housekeeping staff. This plan somehow actually works out, and with help from a lot of friends and some family, the women are able to successfully get into the wedding (where they serve pizza with 24K gold on it) and ultimately into Waliya’s presidential suite. But to their utter dismay, the suitcases that were laden with gold are now empty, leaving them brokenhearted and also back to square one. There’s one last option the girls have, and this is to get on the private jet Waliya is taking the next day to the Cayman Islands.
Geeta and Jasmine become the flight attendants, while we imagine Divya’s just left behind because there’s only room for two. Throughout the film, Geeta takes a drug to keep herself calm; now she drugs the passengers of the private jet, leaving them all fast asleep. However, Waliya’s daughter is not easy to please, and she doesn’t like anything the women hand her. With the drugs exhausted, they wait for her to fall asleep before checking the bags for gold. She wakes up, they get into a physical altercation, and she’s shockingly strong for someone who doesn’t eat or drink anything (apparently, it’s the protein shakes), but somehow the girls lock her up. She tries to use the phone on the flight, telling the captain that they’re all in danger, which is when it’s revealed that it’s in fact Divya, who has finally fulfilled her dream of flying a plane. Though she’s excited to fly, she gets the jitters when she realizes that the plane is totally different from a regular one and there’s no ground personnel to help her land. Geeta has to slap her in the face to make her come to her senses and land the plane. They find the runway together through the clouds and finally land in the most terrifying manner possible, rushing straight into a pair of cows and missing them by an inch. This is Nanheri, the small town in which Divya grew up and dreamt of becoming a pilot. A runway was built there but never saw a flight until this day for Waliya’s burial.
During Crew‘s ending, we learn that Divya informed Jaiveer of their plan so that the DRA can get Waliya and some of his gold, while the women drag the rest off to distribute amongst the people who truly deserve it. The film ends with Jasmine saying that an ant is enough to defeat an elephant, but here there are three. Crew has a delightful ending, which leaves everyone happy while the rich and evil get caught. This is, of course, massively unrealistic, and such a heist would be impossible in real life, but it’s nice to see the ants succeed in a fictional film. The women were never really bad people, and as much as they were desperate for money, they never wanted to hurt those at the same level as them or step on their shoulders; they only seized the opportunity that was cherry-picked for them. Ultimately, they realized that they had to right their wrongs.
