Welcome to the Jungle

Not all movies ought to be dignified with a review. Yet here we are…. reviewing Welcome to the Jungle. Everyone is in this film. And I do mean everyone. There isn’t a face you won’t recognize. From Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Raveena Tandon, Disha Patani and Jacqueline Fernandez to Paresh Rawal, Kiran Kumar, Farida Jalal, Zakir Hussain, Krushna Abhishek and Kiku Sharda it’s a literal stampede of familiar faces and proven talent. What should have been a comic goldmine becomes a traffic jam of characters, each written with roughly the same attention to detail usually reserved for out-of-focus background dancers. You could swap one actor with another and absolutely nothing would change.

Reality, on rare occasions, possesses an uncanny habit of imitating fiction—not deliberately, but with an irony so exquisite that it borders on poetic justice. One suspects that director Ahmed Khan had little inkling that his latest spectacle, Welcome to the Jungle, would ultimately become the most eloquent metaphor for its own creative bankruptcy. Conceived as a madcap satire on the film industry and the absurd economics of blockbuster filmmaking, the film instead collapses under the crushing weight of the very mediocrity it seeks to lampoon. The result is not a parody of commercial cinema but an inadvertent specimen of everything that has gone catastrophically wrong with it.

The basic premise of Welcome To The Jungle instantly reminds you of Farah Khan’s Tees Maar Khan (2010), which also starred Akshay Kumar in the lead. The main difference is that he played the director in that movie. But the difference that matters the most is that WTTJ is better than the 2010 flick, although the latter had its moments here and there. It is anybody’s guess that one needs to keep logic and reasoning miles away while watching such movies. But this is worth only when we get non-stop entertainment in return. That is what happens with Welcome To The Jungle. The basic plot of a wealthy business wanting to make a flop film itself is funny and interesting. It is also something that used to happen during the olden days. The screenplay gives you no time to breathe. There are plenty of bizarre happenings, both during the film shoot and the second half when the terrorism angle takes over. But, again, the fast pace and the fact that the film is honest in what it is trying to do ensures that you don’t mind that much.

The third instalment in the Welcome franchise is called Welcome to the Jungle—but it is so mangled that it will make you yearn for some semblance of sanity. There is nothing wrong with lightweight, silly comedies, but there is a thin line between being delightfully goofy and descending into complete absurdity. Forget crossing that line—director Ahmed Khan’s film starts there, ends there, and keeps you trapped there for nearly three hours.

Finished reading the credit list above? Phew. All right, eyes here, as I tell you more. The intention, from the get go, is clear. Whistle up a massive cast, making the previous editions of the Welcome series seem positively sparse in comparison. Have it led by Akshay Kumar, currently riding his comedy wave. Concoct a plot line where anything goes. Get in a couple of leggy ladies, whose job is to swoon and be silly. And when all else fails, conjure up a CGI gorilla. Not going to bother sharing any other details because there are none. As befits such films, the premise is thinner than a wafer. A richie rich guy wants to make a flop film to pour black money down the drain, leading this bunch into a jungle where reel villains turn out to be real, and mayhem ensues.

Welcome To The Jungle is yet another invitation to a cinematic universe that assumes a bigger budget and a massive star cast equal bigger laughs, as director Ahmed Khan treats the third installment of the popular franchise like a 164-minute variety show rather than a cohesive experience. Based on late Neeraj Vora’s meta-story, it begins as a clever, self-aware critique of the film industry, where a corrupt corporate figure (Zakir Hussain), pushed by the changing political climate, decides to fund a guaranteed box-office flop to launder money. However, instead of exploiting the inherent situational irony of this film-within-a-film scam, writer Farhad Samji buries the narrative urgency under his characteristic, low-effort rhyming dialogues and disjointed sketch comedy and leaves it to Akshay Kumar and Johnny Lever to keep it afloat through their sheer improvisational brilliance.