Sauntering in to watch the latest of the Welcome franchise on Friday morning, I was totally prepared to be met with a loud, silly and boisterous comedy featuring colourful characters and outrageous situations that did not care much for reality or authenticity. What I was not prepared for was the higgledy-piggledy mix of confusing sequences that was brashly paraded in the form of a film and which, the makers claim, has been created for the ‘entertainment’ of a mass audience.
Now there are some films that instantly make you regret your decision to watch them. Ahmed Khan’s Welcome to the Jungle belongs to that category. It also makes you want to run away from the theatre as fast as possible. An insult to the audience’s intelligence from the word go, this film tries to play smart and savvy in its attempt to win them over. It uses the film-within-a-film template as a clever device, also making it work like a built-in disclaimer for its many absurdities. In it, a corrupt businessman enlists the services of two flop directors (Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav), who assemble a motley crew of faded stars (Akshay Kumar and Disha Patani) and aspiring actors (Suniel Shetty and Arshad Warsi) to make a film that will run into huge losses and thus save the businessman from the punishment of evading taxes. Johny Lever as the businessman’s manager and Jacqueline Fernandez as his daughter are thrown into the group to respectively add to its comic and glamour quotient. So far so good, but when the shooting spot gets blown up and the manager receives news that the film needs to make big profits to save the boss from bankruptcy, its cast and crew are flown to the remote mountain hamlet of Azadganj where they have to contend with real terrorists and protect the village’s inhabitants.
The film’s bizarre and wildly impossible premise and its confusing pile-up of characters and circumstances are just the starting point for the action to degenerate into sheer madness. After a point, one doesn’t have the faintest idea what is happening and why, or which scene belongs to which layer of the plot — the idea is to just keep going with the flow and praying for the assault on the senses to end before one loses whatever is left of one’s sanity. As Akshay himself utters in frustration, “Aur bardaasht nahin hota mujh se”, perhaps also giving voice to what most of his viewers are feeling. One thought that persisted while watching the film was that if Welcome to the Jungle was indeed intended to provide pure laughter and entertainment to the masses, wasn’t it irresponsible on the part of the makers to casually include serious issues like terrorism, role of the military and the plight of border area civilians?
Not that it excels in any other aspect. While most dialogues are thick with irony, though not of the comic variety, some of the foolish and often downright rude jokes manage to draw tired smiles. Definitely shot on a lavish budget, the camera takes in sweeping views of the stunning locations and provides spectacular shots of its many stunt and fight sequences, but all to no avail, as they hardly make the viewing experience more tolerable. While the film needs no excuse to launch into one of its many raunchy and raucous music and dance sequences, they all look and sound the same with none being worthy of remembrance.
A parody of Akshaye Khanna’s viral dance sequence in Dhurandhar falls flat while most of Welcome to the Jungle’s fight scenes appear borrowed from old Hollywood or Bollywood sequences. References to Akshay’s earlier roles and his chemistry with Raveena Tandon’s character Zoya deliberately try to feed off their old off and onscreen relationship. Stray efforts at challenging the conventional format of presentation, either by breaking the fourth wall or an abrupt dance video at the interval point, all turn into facile attempts to surprise and entertain. The melodramatic ending, with strong references to Bajrangi Bhaijaan’s climax, is excruciatingly dull, lengthy, boring and oh-so-predictable.
Though Akshay is the obvious hero, Suniel Shetty and Arshad Warsi as good-hearted gangsters steal the show in many ways. The plot, which stands on misunderstandings and mistaken identities, overshoots the boundaries of its comic genre and tries to press forward the message that filmy heroes are no different from commoners. If their intention is pure and they have courage in their hearts, anyone can become a hero in real life. Featuring a large cast, including, Farida Jalal, Shreyas Talpade, and many more, who, to be fair, do their best to contribute to the film’s comic element, its terrorist leader (Jackie Shroff) stands as the lone ‘bad guy’ who must be brought down so that the others can rejoice as good, united, patriotic Indians. Rather a strange and concerning denouement for a film that apparently wishes to sell mindless, massy entertainment.
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