Best of the Best review – college comedy formula gets a Bollywood makeover

What’s engaging in this tale of two best girl friends and a dance competition is not the familiar plot but the whip-fast telling and brilliant choreograpy

There is absolutely nothing unexpected about this Netflix comedy set in the world of rival Bollywood dance groups on American campuses. Each plot twist is instantly familiar, every character recognisable, the essential formula untweaked from a dozen previous college comedies. But it’s funny and snappy, and directed with infectious energy by Lena Khan, one of the few Muslim female film-makers working in Hollywood. The scriptwriters are Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, a pair of millennial comedians who look as if they’ve done enough research on the inner workings of gen Z behaviour to write a PhD.

Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) star as lifelong best friends who enrol together at UCLA. Maya is the clever difficult one; Anjali is the nice pretty one. (It goes without saying Maya is also a total babe.) During freshers’ week they join the college’s Bollywood dance club where, predictably, Maya locks horns with leader Ronak (Ankur Rathee) over the choreography. He wants to base their new-season routine on Bollywood weddings, which, as Maya points out, is a bit trad. If they are going to beat their rivals they will need to come up with something modern and fresh.

No prizes for guessing where this is headed. But the comedy is whip-fast, with plenty of second-generation in jokes. When Anjali’s mum slaps her in full view of the dorm house, Maya jokes that the white kids looked like they wanted to call the police. And it ends brilliantly with a choreography that has a plotline involving a heist of the Koh-i-Noor – the diamond now in the crown jewels. The sequence manages to say something about young future-facing south Asians and diaspora communities while also including a celebration of traditional dance. It’s a high note that will leave you thinking this is up there with the best.

• Best of the Best is on Netflix from 18 September.