Often in my reviews, I talk about the lack of predictability in movies as a positive thing. But the latest Hindi comedy, Welcome to the Jungle, was so atrocious that it had the worst kind of unpredictable stuff. Out of the many terrible, unpredictable elements, the most memorable one was the interval block. The point at which they show the interval card itself was awkward. And to make it more difficult, just when we are about to leave the hall for a much-needed break from the stress, Akshay Kumar pops up and tells us they have shot a song. Since they don’t know where to place it, please watch it at the interval point. I mean, including me, the people inside the theater were unsure whether we were allowed to take a loo break while that song was being played. If properly done, Welcome to the Jungle could have been a classic spoof on what is happening in Bollywood. But the creativity is so absent that they can’t even do self-criticism properly.
So, a rich tax-fraud billionaire wanted to show huge losses in his business to get tax benefits. He figures out that making a fake big-budget movie and making it a colossal flop is the easy way to do that. And for that, he and his team start to look for a bunch of losers. How they managed to find a crew for this mission and what all happens in this project is what we see in this movie.
The idea of Welcome to the Jungle in the present context of Bollywood is indeed relevant. I mean, this idea of movies being made for money laundering was mentioned in the recent Malayalam hit film Mollywood Times. But the problem is, since the franchise is Welcome and the writers and directors are the same folks who took Bollywood to this low, they don’t care about the story being coherent. It is just a collection of gags that are mostly unfunny. The only genuine spoofy humor that I enjoyed was the way they mocked the usage of Urdu in Bollywood movies, and I am pretty sure actor Kiran Kumar’s character from this movie will become a meme.
The movie is about a fake film going through financial issues, and the crew somehow completes the film. And ironically, there was news of Welcome to the Jungle facing financial issues. There are scenes in the first half of the movie where Akshay Kumar’s look is getting changed for each shot, and it pretty much shows you how little interest these people had in making the film. Looking at the cuts, it was way too obvious that the first combination scene of Arashad Warsi, Paresh Rawal, and Rajpal Yadav was shot on different days, as the continuity was a mess.
The basic idea of this movie was revealed in the trailer itself. A film crew that wanted to make a fraudulent big-budget movie goes to a jungle, and they get captured by actual bad guys. This Tropic Thunder idea gets no creative addons. They are simply creating scenes that rarely take the movie forward. It’s like, let’s take them all to a military training camp to add some slapstick jokes. Let’s cast an overweight person to add some fat-shaming jokes. Let’s cast female leads and make them dumb individuals with zero intelligence. Let’s add a lisp to a character so that everything he says will sound funny. If you look at the humor of Welcome to the Jungle, it is largely built around mocking people’s shortcomings.
Ahmed Khan, who delivered three lackluster trashes to Sajid Nadiadwala, is collaborating with his cousin Firoz Nadiadwala and makes sure he treats the Nadiadwalas equally when it comes to quality. While he made us laugh through action films like Baaghi 2, Baaghi 3, and Heropanti 2, he is making sure that doesn’t happen with a comedy film like Welcome to the Jungle. The production design of the “real location” in the film looks more artificial. I somehow feel the movie was written almost entirely on the editing table in order to save it and make it less messy. I mean, there are these cropped, zooming-in cuts for no reason. It is almost like the editor had no coverage shot to hide the glitches. The songs are popping out from every corner with no major purpose. The visual effects are on the okay side. But they have added these AI visuals that had no sync with the visual quality of the rest of the movie.
Akshay Kumar plays the role of Rajiv (his real name), a superstar who is now trying his luck in Bhojpuri films for survival. The kind of Hera Pheri acting we have seen him do is getting repeated here, and for the tone of the comedy, Ahmed Khan wants to achieve, this style of acting was fine. Suniel Shetty is Yeda Anna, the brother of Uday Shetty of Welcome, and he is just one among the crowd. Arshad Warsi plays the part of Majnu Bhai’s brother Romeo Bhai, and he also cracks self-deprecatory jokes to feel relevant to this screenplay. The leading ladies, Disha Patani and Jacqueline Fernandez, are simply there for glamor, and they have communicated that to us through actors like Mukesh Tiwari and Yashpal Sharma, who are in this mess only because of EMI.
Raveena Tandon’s role has something there to perform, and luckily, it wasn’t another character for glamor. Johnny Lever, in his loud style, performed the character given to him. Lara Dutta is in the movie for one whole training montage. Jacky Shroff is the villain, and it seems like they are casting him in multi-starrers, maybe because he is a fun guy to have on film sets. From Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav to Daler Mehendi to Aftab Shivdasani, anyone who wished the producer and director on their birthdays is part of the cast.
Actors who played key roles in Mahabarat and Border are part of the movie, reminding us of their iconic characters. Well, it was so sad to see them selling the image they earned over a lifetime for a trashy movie like this. There will be a lot of people who would say don’t look for logic in this movie. Welcome was a hit, not because of the logic. It created iconic characters and lines, and that film had clarity on what they wanted to create. At the beginning of the movie, we get to see the credits when the new Ucha Lamba Kad song is shown on screen. When the credit reaches the producer Firoz Nadiadwala’s name, the visual abruptly cuts, and later we are shown the names of the producers and director again in a different style. I mean, the last-minute editing of this movie is so hasty that they are making such basic errors in a Bollywood movie.
