From left: Rajpal Yadav, Paresh Rawal, Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Shreyas Talpade and Tusshar Kapoor in a still from ‘Welcome To The Jungle’
| Photo Credit: Star Studios/YouTube
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.Welcome To The Jungle (Hindi)Director: Ahmed KhanCast: Akshay Kumar, Raveena Tandon, Suniel Shetty, Johnny Lever, Jackie Shroff, Arshad Warsi, Paresh Rawal, Rajpal Yadav, Disha Patani, Jacqueline FernandezDuration: 164 minutesSynopsis: A group of misfits is unwittingly trapped in a fake, high-budget film produced by a corrupt businessman to launder massive black money.Lever plays the pointsman of the business magnate who loses his voice in anxiety. He hires two floundering directors (Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav) to cook up a story with a fading star, Rajeev (Akshay Kumar), and cast his erstwhile love interest (Disha Patani) as the heroine, and the producer’s daughter (Jacqueline Fernandez) for the oomph factor. The makers don’t want to completely sever the umbilical cord to the original. So, Suniel Shetty and Arshad Warsi step into the shoes of Nana Patekar and Anil Kapoor as the rogue elements who want to play heroes in the film. When the inside-Bollywood jokes saturate, Khan shifts the base of the shoot to a village in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, ingeniously called Azad Nagar, where a terrorist (Jackie Shroff) is behaving like Gabbar Singh. In a pun on the guerrilla-style shooting, it leads to a meta showdown between the filmy Khiladi and Zatara.
