Welcome To The Jungle Review: Riotous, Raucous, But Rarely Lip-Roaring

An action-comedy that never finds its way out of the woods, Welcome to the Jungle jangles along mindlessly down a messy path. It delivers chaos, cacophony and confusion in bushels. Like it or lump it.  

The film gives an unwieldy cast the kind of freedom that only a muddled, overstuffed screenplay can. The actors stop at nothing, hamming it up like there is no tomorrow.  

While they have a ball, and then some, the Firoz Nadiadwala-produced film, directed by Ahmed Khan (who has toted up quite a few sequels and takes over the reins of this one from Anees Bazmee), lurches merrily from one massive wobble to another.  

No matter how much a critic grumbles, Welcome to the Jungle, the third entry in a franchise that began two decades ago, overflows with ingredients that feel anachronous but could inveigle those who enjoyed the first two. 

For at least three quarters of the way, the comic gambol led by Akshay Kumar as a flop actor who lands the lead role in a quickie commissioned by a tax-evading businessman intent on cooking the books, is served passably by all the lunacy.   

It is wacky and topsy-turvy all right, but it isn't inspired enough for its slapdash, unbridled methods to add up. It is riotous and raucous but rarely rip-roaring.     

A politician (Brijendra Kala) warns a corrupt tycoon (Zakir Hussain) that if the former's party fails to wrest power, the latter could be raided by taxmen.  

The alarmed magnate convenes an urgent meeting and orders his daughter (Jacqueline Fernandez) to cut short a London trip and pitch in with ideas.  

They decide to produce a high-budget movie aimed at reducing their tax liability. A duo of dead-end directors, Dev (Rajpal Yadav) and Das (Paresh Rawal) is summoned.   

Their cameraman, Nainsukh (Shreyas Talpade), is a guy who can 'see' very little. The trio ropes in Raju (Akshay Kumar), a movie star whose career has hit the skids. He now works in C-grade Bhojpuri films.  

While Raju and his manager (Tusshar Kapoor) rejoice at the windfall, Dev and Das stray into the orbit of two underworld dons, both direct successors to the pair of gangsters who spearheaded Welcome (2007) and Welcome Back (2015). 

Yeda Anna (Suniel Shetty, replacing Nana Patekar and portraying a man whose name is borrowed from a don he played in Awara Paagal Deewana) is Uday Shetty's brother, while Romeo (Arshad Warsi, standing in for Anil Kapoor) is Majnu Bhai's sibling.  

The two men gangsters force their way into Dev-Das' film with a single-point agenda: dislodging Raju as the lead.  

Disha Patani is a movie actress Nadia, who has no love lost for her one-time boyfriend. She agrees to be part of the film, provided she has nothing to do with her ex.    

Four other men - two Bhojpuri movie actors (Yashpal Sharma and Mukesh Tiwari) and a pair of comic sidekicks (Krushna Abhishek and Kiku Sharda) - get sucked into the project. The quartet, like the two girls in the mix, is stuck in roles that have no scope of evolving on an overcrowded screen. 

Welcome to the Jungle breaks the fourth wall a few times; besides, in meta sleights, throwing in popular culture tidbits culled from Bollywood films (and even a mythological TV serial) of yore. 

Akshay's over-the-hill movie star hurls a jibe at Vindu Dara Singh's character, the brother and trusted aide of a terror kingpin: You think you are Dara Singh's son?    

The lead actor himself harks back to his Khiladi films. He rattles off the titles of several of them, hoping to impress and intimidate the antagonist played by Jackie Shroff. The latter only smirks disdainfully. 

Daler Mehndi plays a version of himself - he doesn't do a particularly good job of it. The three actors who portrayed Arjun, Karna and Duryodhana in B.R. Chopra's Mahabharat (Firoz Khan, late Pankaj Dheer and Puneet Issar, respectively) make an appearance accompanied by the TV serial's signature tune. 

Nor is that all. Akshay and Disha Patani break into a remixed version of Ucha lamba kad soni bhi tu hadd (originally performed in the company of Katrina Kaif in Welcome). 

Raveena Tandon is around too, in the guise of an inhabitant of a border village under siege. You expect her to go Tip tip barsa paani with Akshay. She doesn't. She stops at spitting at anybody who dares to needle her.             

The frequent nods to the past contribute a bit to the mirth, but the rest of the writing by Farhad Samji is way too erratic to be uniformly effective.  

The script builds upon a story idea credited to the late Neeraj Vora without the original source of inspiration - Tropic Thunder, directed by and starring Ben Stiller alongside Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. - being acknowledged. 

Welcome to the Jungle bungs in whatever it can rustle up and get away with. While it is at it, it lampoons, among other things, the overdose of patriotic fervour that Hindi films about anti-terror secret agents peddle these days.  

It also parodies contemporary cinema's over-reliance on CGI and VFX, the wages of movie stardom, the ways of screen lovers and gangsters, and filmmaking itself.  

Welcome to the Jungle, however, lacks the sense to refrain from mocking a particular body type, ageing, speech and voice defects of various kinds, a language, and even myopia, in its blind pursuit of amusement. Not funny at all.  

The gags are overly laboured, none more so than a protracted passage that features Lara Dutta as a military instructor who puts the entire cast and crew of the film-within-the-film through rigorous army training.  

An erected set goes up in smoke, and the moneybag hits a sharp downturn. Dev and Das are faced with an ultimatum: wrap up the film quickly in Azadpur, a border village terrorised by Zatara (Shroff) and his men.    

In the village, the ragtag film crew encounters an old lady (Farida Jalal) who has a lot to say but mumbles her words unintelligibly. And old man (Kiran Kumar) interprets her thoughts in highfalutin Urdu that is even more unintelligible. It is all meant to be in jest, but it borders on the objectionable.  

Welcome to the Jungle has no dearth of words, but the film can be summed up in just three words: jungle mein mangled.