Prem loves math.
He’s fond of factors, partial to plus signs, devoted to long division. If he was the sort of 12-year-old who carved things in trees (which he’s not), he might take a pocketknife and carve “Prem + math = (heart).”
He’s pretty good at it, too—so good, in fact, that he and his middle school math frienemy, Claire, are both being bussed to a nearby Jersey City high school to take a math class there. The middle-school math curriculum is just too easy.
And on Prem’s first day, it looks as though high school won’t be much of a hurdle, either. The enthusiastic teacher tosses a pop quiz the class’s way, and Prem’s the only student to finish by the ring of the bell.
But the teacher, Ms. Sage, has another equation to toss out before class is dismissed—and it’s a doozy. She wants her students to construct an algebraic equation where they themselves are a factor. In other words, “X+Y-Z=Prem.”
But that poses a problem for Prem—one that a scientific calculator can’t help with. Because outside of math, who is he?
Prem doesn’t really know. Sure, he knows what his mother wants him to be—and yeah, he wants that, too. But the kid knows next to nothing about his father, Suresh. He died when Prem was just 5 years old. Sometimes Prem doesn’t even remember what he looked like, much less who he was. And in the algebraic equation of Prem, Suresh would surely be a prime variable.
Prem’s mom, Priya, doesn’t like talking about Suresh much. She wants them both to move on. But after some prodding, she tells Prem about the night she and Suresh met—at a hip, happening lounge where Suresh was spitting a few rhymes.
Yep, that’s right: Prem’s dad was a rapper. One of the best, his mother says. And Prem starts to wonder whether he might have the chops to rap a little, too.
So Prem digs through an old shoebox filled with Suresh’s old stuff, the contents of which he’s never seen before. He pulls out Suresh’s rhyme book, where he had jotted down words, lyrics, thoughts, sayings. “The best never rest,” Prem reads again and again.
And then, when Prem looks up, he sees him: his father. And without so much as a 10-minute catch-up session, Suresh encourages Prem to explore the rap wrapped inside him. “Hip-hop is in your DNA,” he tells him. “You gotta dream big, little man.”
For most of his life, Prem’s been known as the math guy. And honestly, he’s loved it. But could Prem love more than coefficients and constants? Could he come to cherish beatboxes and turntable scratches as much? More?
Only one way to find out: Start rapping.
Priya is very concerned with who, or what, might be influencing her genius so. Mostly, her worry manifests in healthy ways. Sure, you could argue that Prem’s mom is a little overly protective. But she’s still supportive and encouraging and clearly very loving. Every decision she makes is shaped by the priority of Prem’s well-being.
Prem’s newfound interest in rap throws a gold chain into the family’s well-oiled life, and certainly Prem makes some mistakes along the way. His relationship with his mom suffers because of it.
But rap music itself—at least the sort of rap that Prem’s dead/imaginary father embraces—isn’t to blame. Through hip-hop, Suresh encourages Prem to be bold and courageous. And when Prem throws down some lyrics that demean others, Suresh tells him that’s not the way to do it. “Phony rappers knock other people down to build themselves up,” Suresh says. “Real emcees, like us, we own who we are.”
Through Suresh’s guidance, Prem realizes that rap and ‘rithmatic actually have a lot in common. Suresh says that freestyling is a lot like algebra: You know the word you want to end a line with, and you just need to fill in the variables as the song goes along. Most importantly, Prem uses rap to help his less-mathematically inclined high school friends to not only learn mathematical principles, but seemingly enjoy the subject more.
Late in the movie, Priya discovers a rhyme that Suresh wrote as he was struggling with cancer. He admits that to the world outside, it looks like he’s in some sort of prison. “But with you and Prem as my light, no one’s freer than me,” Suresh writes. And he learned something else: Even though he would often say “the best never rest,” he realized that “our happiest moments were somehow the quietest.”
[Spoiler Warning]: When Priya tells Prem about his father’s rapping skills, Prem takes it to mean that his father was famous—one of New York’s best underground rappers. Turns out that isn’t true, and Prem is disappointed: His pop wanted to be a great rapper, and he failed. “You gave up,” Prem scolds his father. “You could’ve done something great.”
“I did, Prem,” Suresh tells him. “I hit the lottery. My life was everything I wanted it to be.” He gave up on rap because he found something better: A family. His love for hip-hop was eclipsed by the love he had for his son.
Disney often lauds chasing your dreams no matter the cost. Some of its other movies and television shows suggest that fame is the ultimate dream. But World’s Best upends that notion: Sometimes dreams change. And fame is nothing next to family.
Prem’s family members are Hindus, and we see a couple of images of Hindu gods. Both Priya and Prem have statues of Ganesha (an elephant-headed Hindu deity), and Priya finds a small figure of Krishna in Suresh’s belongings. Priya explains to Prem that his name means love, and that Krishna is the Hindu god of love.
But Suresh, despite his postmortem costarring role in World’s Best, is not himself a spiritual manifestation. Rather, the movie explains his presence as a mental construct of Prem (and later Priya). “I’m like a memory remixed with a fantasy,” Suresh explains to Prem. “You cooked me up in that brain of yours.” When Prem argues that he’s too old for an imaginary friend, Suresh says, “Well, you’re too young for a midlife crisis, but here we are.”
Otherwise, the concept of the afterlife feels a little uneven. One set of rap lyrics tells listeners that we only have one life, and we should make the most of it. Other lyrics suggest that Suresh is looking down at Prem from above.
Priya listens to self-help podcasts to help her deal with grief (although the messages she hears seem largely about ignoring it). “Float away from grief,” one says. “Face the future with an open heart. Which brings us to our next sponsor …”
In a flashback, Priya takes Prem back to the night he met Suresh. She’s dating another guy at the time, but she breaks it off during the evening. Meanwhile, Suresh keeps trying to ask Priya out (calling her both the prettiest and smartest girl in the club), but Priya keeps turning him down cold. Not until she hears him rap does she agree to go out for a drink with him.
We see Priya’s girlfriends during the evening, too, wearing slightly revealing clubwear. One of them brags about that evening (breaking the conceit of the flashback), saying that they literally “saved [Priya’s] butt” from getting a tattoo of her boyfriend.
Prem’s best friend, Jerome, has a new girlfriend, and he uses that girlfriend as an excuse to put some distance between himself and Prem. (The main reason would seem to be an effort to improve his social status.) Later, Jerome says that he and his girlfriend broke up—in part because he caught her making out with someone else in English class.
Mr. Oh, Prem’s old middle-school math teacher, has a crush on Priya, and he references having once asked her out. Priya also seems to feel a certain attraction to the teacher, and Suresh occasionally sounds jealous of him.
A fed-up Prem tries to punch a bully, but he gets his feet tangled up in an electrical cord. He’s falling as the camera cuts away. The next time we see Prem, he has a cast on his arm.
In one rap song, Prem lashes out at his one-time friend Jerome, who (as noted above) seemed to drop Prem for his girlfriend. Prem raps about Jerome and his girlfriend—and the song winks at using the word “a–.” (The word isn’t uttered, because Suresh stops him. “Whoa! Too far!” he says.)
Outside that, the only real language issues in World’s Best are a couple of misuses of God’s name, some name-calling and one use of the word “fart.” Oh, and there’s a use of the word “dang,” too.
When exploring Suresh’s legacy, Prem convinces two high-school friends of his to drive him to the Leopard Lounge, where his father supposedly performed. That proved to be an exaggeration: Suresh actually worked as a bartender there, and we see him pour a drink or two in flashback. (Suresh’s old manager, though, admits that Suresh had talent.) In flashback, we see people in the club, presumably drinking. And, as mentioned, Suresh asks Priya if she’d like to have a drink with him.
The lounge is an all-ages club. But when Prem asks to sign up for an open-mic night, the manager says that it’s a “two-drink minimum” to participate, then quotes him the price for a cream soda.
Priya is understandably concerned when she learns that Prem is hanging out with high school kids. One of her first horrified questions to him is, “Do they vape?” (They do not.)
Prem has run-ins with bullies, and both sides treat each other unkindly. (The bullies do their best to throw Suresh’s rhyme book in the trash and mock Prem for having a dead dad.)
When Claire saves the book from the trash and tries to support Prem by saying that her dad keeps journals, too (only his are apparently in elvish), an embarrassed Prem lashes out at her—calling her “Creepy Claire” (a common nickname for the poor girl). Prem lies to and talks back to his mother, too—though he repents of all of these actions later on in the film.
A bar patron treats Suresh disrespectfully. The original rap songs that Prem and Suresh perform contain their share of posturing (pretty common in the genre), and Prem hangs up posters of some rap artists who might have some questionable songs in their career catalog.
We hear how Priya won nationals in Mathlympics herself (which, it’s suggested, is a goal she harbors for her son). She was so excited that “I threw up everywhere.”
So often, coming-of-age tales involve good kids going “bad,” if you will—pushing away their parents’ rules and restrictions and sometimes even rejecting the parents themselves. Kids realize that they only thought they loved, say, baseball, because of their parents’ pressures—when in fact they wanted to be trapeze artists all along.
That makes Prem’s story different from most of those we see on screen—and more similar to those we see in real life.
Yes, Prem explores what it might mean to put his mother’s beloved math on the shelf and follow a very different path. But in the end, he discovers that mathematics and music don’t need to compete. They can exist side-by-side. He can honor his mother’s strict, logical upbringing and still embrace his dad’s free-spirited dreaming. And when it comes time for Prem to tell us who Prem is—getting back to the algebraic equation his teacher challenged him with—he acknowledges that the variables and constants in his own life are dizzyingly paradoxical—as they are in all of our lives.
“I’m confident. Sometimes,” he says. “I’m a winner and a loser. A thinker and a dreamer.” He fails. He succeeds. He struggles. He soars. He acknowledges that life is messy and will always be so, and that sometimes answers are elusive. Life isn’t a math problem: it’s … life.
World’s Best, the title, seems at first to point to what Suresh was or wanted to be. It points to what Prem wants to become. But the story, ultimately, tells us that the definition of the “world’s best” is broader than we might imagine. For Priya, Suresh was the world’s best husband. For Prem, he was the world’s best father for the short time he knew him.
Can you quantify that sort of success? Of course not: No one’s voting on such things. And yet, when your child tells you, “You’re the best,” that means something. The coffee cups that say, “No. 1 Dad” are, in a way, absolutely true—even if those cups are given to a million fathers. The Mother’s Day cards that say, “You’re the greatest mom in the world” can be absolutely right—at least sometimes.
World’s Best doesn’t encourage us to become great rappers, or great mathematicians. But it does remind us that we should try to be our best for the people in our world. Even when we fail in that (as we always do and always will), we’ll succeed sometimes, too. And we’ll be there the next day to try it again.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
