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.
Johnny Lever could play Rajpal Yadav’s role. Kiran Kumar could slip into Zakir Hussain’s shoes. Nobody would notice. The women fare even worse. One can barely distinguish them from each other. Jacqueline, sporting blonde hair at least has a visual differentiator. Urvashi Rautela and Disha Patani merge into one interchangeable pair of impossibly long legs, tiny waists and heaving bosoms. That’s about as much personality the film can allow them. The story is explicitly about….no, sorry, please delete that! There is no story.
The one-line prompt by writer Farhad Samji to leverage the franchise value of Welcome or whatever you want to call this is simply that a very rich man wants to evade income tax raids and lose money. So, they decided to make a film. Director duo Dev (Rajpal Yadav) and Das (Paresh Rawal) are summoned along with their cameraman, Nainsukh (Shreyas Talpade). “Are we rolling?” someone asks. I think so Nainsukh quips because he literally cannot see. Meanwhile, Yeda Anna (Suniel Shetty) and Romeo (Arshad Warsi) as Majnu Bhai’s siblings enter the fray. Yashpal Sharma, Mukesh Tiwari, Krushna Abhishek and Kiku Sharda also join the chaos. How can Daler Mehndi play Daler Mehndi on screen and still manage to do a terrible job? He plays his own impersonator.
Actors who portrayed Arjun, Karna, and Duryodhana in B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat (Firoz Khan, the late Pankaj Dheer, and Puneet Issar, respectively) make an appearance too. Under Ahmad Khan’s direction the film hurtles from film sets to the Indo-Pak border, where Jackie Shroff is a dreaded mujahideen Zatara but appears looking like Ali Baba after a particularly exhausting encounter with all forty thieves. I went through the motions of watching it but absolutely nothing left enough of an impact to actually register. The film’s most revealing moments however have nothing to do with comedy. It lies in the way it treats Raveena Tandon and Lara Dutta. These are women who once headlined successful films opposite Akshay Kumar. They continue to possess remarkable screen presence and charisma. Yet the film behaves as though acknowledging them as desirable women would somehow violate the laws of commercial cinema.
Akshay’s character is of a man capable of flirting with even a single-celled organism and yet he maintains a one arms distance from them. There is an obvious wink towards Akshay and Raveena’s off-screen history in their scene together but it exists solely as a joke. Romance is apparently reserved for younger heroines. Nostalgia, for contemporaries. An Akshay-Disha Patani is awkwardly shoehorned into the proceedings without anyone blinking. But imagine Akshay romancing women his own age? That, it appears, is where this fantasy finally draws the line! We are meant to laugh at characters not with them. One man speaks such pristine Urdu that nobody understands him.
Another communicates in gibberish. One loses his voice midway through sentences while his lips continue moving. Another has a lisp. The humour is juvenile, spectacularly unsophisticated and often astonishingly lazy. And yet and this may be the film’s greatest trick, it occasionally extracts a reluctant laugh. Somewhere between surrender and fatigue, a chuckle escapes. There are films we watch. Films we admire. Films we critique. And then there are films like Welcome to the Jungle which ultimately reveal less about cinema than they do about us. If this qualifies as entertainment then perhaps the real review isn’t of the film at all. It’s the audience willing to settle for it.
(THE REVIEWER IS A FREELANCE CONTRIBUTOR. VIEWS ARE PERSONAL)