Welcome to the Jungle review: How Akshay Kumar and co. turn madness into a patience-testing slog

And that’s where the challenge crops up: Do you continue being defiant about that opinion? Or do you surrender to the bafflingly absurd nature of it all and try to have a good time? Indeed, it is rare that a film makes you see-saw within this dilemma and WTTJ wins at least as a solid psychological experiment.

The film brings back the hit trio of Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty and Paresh Rawal after a long gap, only to confirm the fact that it takes a lot more than just three good actors to put together a worthwhile comedy. Interestingly, WTTJ’s story and screenplay are credited to the late Neeraj Vora, whose ingenuity as a writer produced films like Rangeela (1995), Hera Pheri (2000) and Golmaal (2006). Whether the essence of Vora’s material survived the transition to Ahmed Khan and his dialogue writer, Farhad Samji, or was subjected to a bruising process of changes and dilutions, is a question without an answer at this point.

Film within a film

A corrupt businessman wants to convert his oodles of black money into white before authorities catch up to him. His daughter, played by Jaqueline Fernandez, sporting a wavy, blonde hair look, sits by his side, hurling the worst ideas at him for the task. A man-Friday (Johnny Lever) suggests he produces a movie worth Rs. 2000 crores, but by hiring the worst two directors on the planet, so that it intentionally bombs. Those two directors, Dev and Das (Rajpal Yadav and Paresh Rawal), make the worst casting choices on the planet to make sure that the ship sinks as ordered. And those casting choices come together to create a meta mayhem which was amply clear by the trailer alone, traces a game of chaos and confusion reminiscent of the 2008 Hollywood release Tropical Thunder in (of course!) a jungle.

Why that jungle borders a fictional village named Azadganj in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, where a terrorist outfit named Mujahideen (led by Jackie Shroff’s Zatara) hilariously rides horses and torments the village folk, is another of the bewildering puzzles one tries to solve while watching the film.

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It so happens that Dev and Das’s film-within-the-film is centred on an army crew that rescues a different, lesser-troubled village. Once that fake army crew reaches Azadganj because of a peculiar requirement, it doesn’t take any prizes for guessing that it unwittingly tasks itself with defeating Mujahideen and rescuing the poor people of Azadganj from its clutches. Inside a meeting room somewhere in Mumbai, this idea would have sold itself within minutes, given the keywords ‘franchise’, ‘comedy’ and ‘army crew’, considering it merrily allows the makers to stuff their film with as many popular faces as they can.

Akshay Kumar as the failed superstar, Rajiv, who’s currently earning a pittance with his Bhojpuri numbers. Arshad Warsi as gangster #1 Romeo, the brother of Majnu bhai (the OG Anil Kapoor character from the 2007 release Welcome) and Suniel Shetty as gangster #2 Yeda Anna, brother of Nana Patekar’s Uday Shetty. Disha Patani as the actress Nadia Daruwala. Raveena Tandon as the desperate woman from Azadganj. Shreyas Talpade as the cinematographer who is nearly blind. Tusshar Kapoor as Rajiv’s assistant. Farida Jalal, Krushna Abhishek, Kiku Sharda, Daler Mehndi, Aftab Shivdasani, Vindu Dara Singh, and so many other known actors get squeezed in for respective measly purposes; well, at least they all have a semblance of a purpose when compared to the poor, CGI-rendered gorilla of the film, which doesn’t even serve as a pun on the guerrilla filmmaking employed in the film.

Leveraging Welcome’s cult following

WTTJ is a glaringly obvious attempt to leverage the cult following of the franchise’s first instalment, Welcome (released in 2007; the second film in the series, Welcome Back, released in 2015, but couldn’t match the success of the first). While it seemingly follows the 2007 film’s blueprint of high-stakes playacting that throws one insane, comical twist after another, it nevertheless lets go of the sincerity and precision with which the original was created. Everything is frustratingly slapdash with WTTJ. Majnu Bhai’s famous donkey-on-horse painting is rehashed to evoke laughter, but the joke is that the horse is on top of the donkey this time around. “Ghaas pe lete ghaslet ke aulaad” (we can’t even attempt to translate this) says one character, underlining the level of dialogue-writing throughout the film.

Production design that is a mix of basic facades, green screens and AI; makeup and prosthetics that are only marginally more convincing than those of a school play; gags and comic bits that are wrung dry because of their sheer repetition; song and action sequences that are neither funny nor memorable — these and many other facets scream of an effort that simply does not meet today’s moviegoing expectations.

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Still, the film isn’t without a few sequences that make you chuckle. Farida Jalal’s unintelligible speeches are understood by one person in the entire village, who himself uses the most complex Urdu for his translations. A bizarre childhood event causes Johnny Lever’s character to suddenly go zero-volume midway through a monologue. Akshay Kumar and Suniel Shetty take part in a game of one-upmanship in trying to hog all the limelight in the film-within-the-film. Raveen Tandon and Akshay Kumar refer to their own speculated past in a comedy bit. These sequences are entertaining in isolation, but they end up getting lost in the vast pile of terribly lazy and trite bits.

A character introduced at a crucial point in the narrative has a lisp, and that’s both the beginning and the end of the joke. It goes on and on, but you don’t know whether to be offended or to let it slip because of the overall inanity behind it.

Will Ben Stiller (who directed and acted in Tropic Thunder) sue the team of WTTJ? That’d probably be a compliment.