30,000 ft, 3 stewardesses, 1 big heist: Crew Movie Review

An airline that is failing to pay it’s stewardesses, resorts to giving them shift allowances. This hurts the crew who decide to move more than just carry-on luggage on their international trips in this 2024 movie.

Crew revolves around the lives of Geeta Sethi (Tabu), Jasmine Kohli (Kareena Kapoor) and Divya Rana (Kriti Sanon) as they struggle to handle work pressures while worrying about family budgets and relationships. As the plot reveals the sad stories behind the cheerful smiles as they welcome passengers, you can sympathize with the trio. An unexpected in-the-air death of a fellow senior crew member reveals that he has been smuggling gold. The ladies swoop-in to play the mules. This is successful and they are slowly getting the much needed money. Unfortunately, the police is getting suspicious. Acting on an anonymous tip, customs officers detain the three stewardesses only to find nothing. The gang has managed to hide the contraband in the plane. Their happiness is short-lived with the hidden gold drops from the hatch in a subsequent flight. Lack of evidence saves them from jail, but now everyone knows who hid this. Much later, the team realize that they are moving the gold for the airline chairman, Vijay Walia, who is steps away from fleeing the country.

The last act unfolds with the crew looking to get the gold back to the country (and getting a cut in the process). Shot against the luxury of the Al Burj hotel in Dubai, we see the pieces fall in place as the absconding billionaire lands back on Indian soil to get his comeuppance.

The movie is a comical journey and the back stories briefly interrupting the flow to set context. All three leads play to their strengths; Tabu as the no-nonsense senior, Kareena as what I can say a grown-up version of Poo from K3G and Kriti as the newcomer who still has hopes to touch the sky. Diljit’s portrayal as customs officer Jaiveer Singh is decent – he doesn’t get enough screen time for me to comment much on his performance. He plays Kriti’s love interest – a story that seems like an afterthought. Kapil Sharma as Arun, Tabu’s husband, has his one-line quips and adds to the comic element. If there ever was a character that oozed trickery & cunning it would be Vijay Walia (played by Saswata Chatterjee) who plays the chairman of Kohinoor Airlines. This is a not so subtle reference to the real life billionaire who allegedly left India with thousands of crores as his airline business tanked.

Typically heist movies spend entire acts setting up the plan, overcoming obstacles and the like. CREW on the other hand seems to squeeze this all in the last act – almost as-if the writer remembered this on the morning of meeting the director and hastily added the pages.

I would have enjoyed that part being stretched out a bit as the process of planning and facing challenges makes it all the more interesting. Things fall into place or the challenges end up getting resolved without a hitch. However, when I step back and look at the movie in its entirety, I don’t find it as big a problem as it would normally be.

There were a number of plot-holes though, which are quite glaring. How did the senior flight attendant Rajvanshi strap gold bars under his shirt and walk through airport security? Covering gold balls with a thin layer of chocolate is not going to fool the X-ray machine. Finally, if a plan flies away from a pre-filled course, the air traffic control teams will notice and alert the air force – especially with international flights. The writer has taken artistic liberty in scripting these.

Overall, I stepped out of the theater feeling content about the time spent with a good doze of laughs. Go watch if you have time to kill.