Stream It Or Skip It: ‘World’s Best’ On Disney+, Where A Young Math Whiz Wants To Become A Rapper Like His Late Dad

Coming-of-age films geared towards tweens and teens often have very high highs and low lows, to give the viewer that sense of triumph that the main character feels when he/she reaches their goals. A new Disney+ film about a 12-year-old math whiz that wants to rap like his late father has highs and lows, but ones that are more realistic.

WORLD’S BEST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Prem Patel (Manny Magnus) is a 12-year-old math whiz from Jersey City; he’s so good at math that he has dreams about winning the Mathlympics, and he’s one of two middle-schoolers who take high school math classes. The other is Claire (Piper Wallace), who knits and tells Prem that her family doesn’t “celebrate” summer.

He lives with his mother Priya (Punam Patel), a nurse who is also a math whiz. She’s been a single mom to Prem since his father Suresh (Utkarsh Ambudkar) died when Prem was five; her philosophy has always been to move forward, but she also listens to podcasts that deal with grief, so she might not be practicing what she preaches.

In middle school, Prem gets bullied by two eighth graders named Brooklyn (Chris River) and Sharn (Liam Wignall). He can always depend on his buddy Jerome (Max Malas), but Jerome, who spent the summer making TikTik dance videos, decides he wants a “break” from hanging out with Prem. He thinks being with Prem will label him as a “math guy” and he wants to take a chance doing something else.

When Prem gets an assignment to make an “equation” about himself, he asks Priya about his dad, especially a pic of the two of them taken at a place called the Leopard Lounge. She tells him about the day they met, about his freestyling skills, and about his ambitions to become “the world’s best emcee.”

Prem gets it into his head that he should do the same and signs up for the middle school talent show under that very moniker. He finds a book of rhymes his dad kept and starts studying them, as well as listening to as much hip hop as he can find. But the ultimate influence comes from Suresh himself, who comes to Prem as a figment of his fertile imagination.

Prem also becomes friends with two of his math classmates, Gabe (Dorian Giordano) and Mercedes (Kayla Njeri), who encourage Prem’s dreams to become an emcee. But Priya, always looking forward, wishes Prem would just concentrate on his studies and not try to follow in his father’s footsteps.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Any coming-of-age film where a kid does something unexpected, like Akeelah And The Bee.

Performance Worth Watching: Manny Magnus is more or less a young version of Ambudkar, who co-wrote the film, as well as the hip hop songs on the soundtrack. Not only does he do a great job as Prem, but he is a heck of a rapper, as we see during the musical numbers where he duets with Ambudkar.

Memorable Dialogue: “The World’s Best Never Rest” is a phrase that Suresh used to say all the time, and Prem has carried it into his life, as well.

What Age Group Is This For?: While World’s Best is geared towards teens and tweens, it’s pretty much appropriate for all ages.

Our Take: One of the most enjoyable things about World’s Best, directed by Roshan Sethi, is that it’s not a predictable coming-of-age story. It doesn’t take wild twists and turns, but it progresses sort of like life does.

Prem gets interested in hip hop as a way to reconnect with a father that he barely remembers, and to break out of the “math guy” shell he has been in for his entire school life. But it’s not like he miraculously starts rapping. In fact, the only place Prem himself really drops some rhymes through most of the film is in the fantasy sequence music videos with Ambudkar. And just when you think he’s going to break out in the real life world of the film and start rapping, he doesn’t. ‘

That was refreshing, because just because you become interested in something, even if you think it’s in your DNA because of what your parents did, it doesn’t mean that it comes out of you naturally and right away. As the image of Suresh repeatedly tells Prem, he has to put in the work, just like he does with math, in order to maximize his natural talent.

There’s a bit of the cultural expectations the kids of Indian parents work under, but that’s treated very lightly in the film. Priya encouraged Prem to study math because of his natural ability and because it matched hers; we don’t find out until close to the end of the film the hows and whys of Suresh’s life path, which ultimately led him to settle down with a family and not become the world’s best emcee, and that was just fine with him.

A couple of story threads, like Priya’s flirtations with Prem’s old math teacher, don’t go anywhere, but it doesn’t detract from how we rooted for Prem to succeed as a whiz at both math and rhymes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. World’s Best is a feelgood movie that the whole family can enjoy, with some great songs and funny performances by Ambudkar and Magnus. The story doesn’t have the extreme highs and lows of other coming-of-age films, but that just leads to a story that more closely resembles real life than most films in this genre.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.