Welcome to the Jungle
Director: Ahmed Khan
Actors: Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Arshad Warsi
Rating: 3 stars
Since you must thank me for the attention to the matter — the totally senseless, madcap comedy, Welcome to the Jungle, is primarily set in POK (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir)! A character asks a kid, who’s its resident, what’s that? The boy goes, “Pock!”
The place is a village named Azad Ganj, like, say, Ramgarh from Sholay — repeatedly attacked by a group of terrorists (for dacoits), with a chief named Zatara (Jackie Shroff) for Gabbar.
This is the third part of the Welcome (2007) franchise. Of which there’s been one in each decade. Unlike the thoroughly shoddy, sexist, Welcome Back (2015), though — this threequel bears no relation to Welcome itself.
It’s not even been directed by Anees Bazmee. Ahmed Khan (Lakeer, Fool N’ Final, Baaghi 2, Heropanti 2) has helmed it better than anything he’s directed before.
On the face of it, Welcome, without Uday Shetty (Nana Patekar), Majnu Bhai (Anil Kapoor) equals Sholay minus Jai and Veeru, no? No.
Somehow, it does matter. For the heck of it, what the filmmakers bring in Suniel Shetty as Anna and Arshad Warsi as Romeo, bhais from the underworld, playing brothers of Uday and Majnu, respectively. That apart, you recall that painting of the donkey over the horse from Welcome.
In terms of drawing a comparison, this is way closer to the hit action-comedy, Tropic Thunder (2008), headlined, written and directed by Ben Stiller.
Which was about a guerrilla-style shoot of a war film that goes haywire, once the actors are forced to become real-life soldiers, to survive an actual gunfire!
That film within this film is also called Welcome to the Jungle. The purpose to shoot it is to make an over-budget flop picture, run into massive losses, that its financier (Zakir Hussain) can cook to offset black money. God knows, once upon a time in Bollywood, I’m told, this was actually a thing!
The strategy’s clear. Hire a crappy crew, first. As in directors Dev, Das (Rajpal Yadav, Paresh Rawal), even a partially blind cinematographer (Shreyas Talpade)! At the centre is Akshay Kumar for a has-been hero, who’s now a Bhojpuri star, perhaps modelled on Pawan Singh — some of his bits are absolutely hilarious!
Consider the role call above. Most of whom could star as solo-leads. And this is only a minor glimpse of the huge, minimum 30-plus, campy, secondary cast to follow — from Jacqueline Fernandez, Disha Patani (“for the glamour,” as one of the characters says), down to the men from Mahabharat, as in Duryodhan (Puneet Issar), Arjun (Firoz Khan), Karan (Pankaj Dheer), besides Johny Lever, who goes mute mid-sentence.
You sit perennially in anticipation of the next lot of actors to be introduced. This comedy is cameo central, foremost. Such face-spotting can be fun, sometimes. As it is, it’s hard to figure how much this picture’s guardian, i.e. producer Firoz A Nadiadwallah, must have paid to put together this galaxy.
There’s even a moment in the movie’s interval, when Akshay shows up on the screen to suggest there’s a song they’d shot, with him and Disha, that they couldn’t place in the picture. So, the audiences can watch it in that break!
Kyon? Well, that’s the name of a fine track, by Talwiinder, that I caught for a bit on my way to grab Bombay’s A-grade A-1 samosas. One heck of an expensive music video, surely.
The spends aren’t limited to that. I suppose the public demand for big-screen spectacle is such that even a straight-up comedy — otherwise a low-expectation, limited-budget genre — is packed with pyrotechnics, fighter jets, choppers, to the point that it could’ve been a high-octane actioner on its own.
Frankly, this sort of screwball, slapstick stuff — whether timepass, or terrible, and this is the former — doesn’t merit a review. You enjoy it for the parts, rather than the whole, within a disjointed mess, and measure it by the number of laughs; even a few are good enough.
As with the OG Welcome that grew into a cult, over time, spliced into clips online. There are quite a few in here. Watch out for that scene, for instance, where Akshay’s over-the-top character refuses to die in the film within this film: “Marne main jaan daal raha hoon…” Ded!
