2 Average

"Racism" is a serious issue with extremely deep impacts on the global society in general and on sub-continent in particular. Attempting to make a movie on the topic is, in my humble opinion, not only a very difficult task, rather its a very heavy social responsibility to portray the issue in its truest form; figuring out the causes of the issue and suggesting remedies. It is indeed a huge responsibility to portray such a subject on celluloid.
The credit must go to Vishesh Films and Mohit Suri for accepting the responsibility and trying to make a film on this very sensitive topic. But accepting such a huge responsibility asks for a thorough research; some logical cinematic adaptation and some convincing narrative. The film in question which is oddly titles as "Crook - its good to be bad" (I seriously fail to understand the relation of the title and the tagline with the subject and narrative over here). Unfortunately the film fail to carry the huge responsibility carried on its shoulders due to ingredients of the film working exactly opposite to how they should've worked.
The film falters mainly due to the following reasons...

o The issue of racism is a national, rather global issue. Presentation of this issue should've been on an equivalent scale. What starts off to be a serious global issue in the film, ends up being strictly a PERSONAL ISSUE of a person. So as a result, Arjan Bajwa's character turns out to be a villain out of any ordinary love story / revenge movie. Where the film should’ve been exploring the faults in the societies for the issue, it ends up blaming personal inclinations and stubbornness for the concern, which in real life has bothered and affected several hundreds of lives in the sub-continent. This in fact is a serious flaw in the movie; scale of narrative falls way below the scale of the theme.
o The first hour of the film is the second biggest culprit. With only a few glimpses of the issue at hand, the film un-ambitiously keeps on wandering on the clichéd route of comedy and romance. By the time, the narrative starts taking the core issue seriously, almost a precious half of the run-time is wasted and the remaining time seems to less for the issue to justify the issue at hand.
o In such a movie, the characters should've been solidly built and elaborated, but the screenplay keeps itself busy in the useless and unimpressive scenes of annoying friends, clichéd romance and un-required obscenity of strip club visits. As a result the film finds itself left only with one hour or so to simultaneously explain the behaviors of the characters and to explore the issue of racism. The end-product thus is although glossy, yet lacks the HARD_HITTING punch in context of the huge theme.
o Unlike usual Bhat films, the music is plain ordinary and doesn't do much to enhance the impact of the movie.
o The dialogues also lack the required seriousness and credibility
The performances are mixed. Emran is decent, but i won't rank it among his finest. He has performed way much better in so many other movies. Maybe it is because the role and the script lack the meat. Neha Sharma looks cute and confident but her dialogue delivery needs loads of work to be done. The standout performance surely is of Arjan Bajwa, who impresses in a role which in itself is not impressive at all. The bunch of unasked-for actors playing the roles of Emran’s friends in Australia are annoying to say the least. Kavin Dave is an adorable performer but his role is one of the weakest links in the chain.
The screenplay and direction leaves a lot to be desired. Mohit Suri has done some remarkable work in the past including masterpieces like "Kalyug" and "Woh Lamhe". But "Crook" can be termed as his weakest product yet.
Overall, this is a huge opportunity lost. The movie misses the required glory with quite a huge margin. It is not "Hard-Hitting" enough. With the title totally mismatching the product, this Vishesh Film presentation "Is quite bad to be considered good"