Anupama Chopra reviews Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Ahmed Khan and starring Akshay Kumar and Disha Patani, for The Hollywood Reporter India. Anupama notes the film leans on one of her favourite devices — the film within a film — with the movie the characters are making also titled Welcome to the Jungle, and at the end, when the film-in-the-film releases as a blockbuster that lands a one-star review, she suspects Ahmed knew exactly what was coming. She traces the franchise back to Anees Bazmee's 2007 original, a comedy of errors built on blazing silliness, where Nana Patekar's wannabe-actor don Uday Shetty and Anil Kapoor's terrible painter Majnu Bhai could still raise a smile — and points out that Majnu Bhai's awful donkey-on-a-horse painting makes a fleeting cameo here. Anupama enjoys the gleefully stupid running gag built around characters who can't communicate — Johny Lever losing his voice under stress, Kiran Kumar speaking impossibly chaste Urdu, Farida Jalal babbling gibberish — and singles out Akshay Kumar, all toothy grin and unbridled energy, as the spoilt-star-skewering hero the film needed far more of.
Anupama writes that across a punishing near-three-hour runtime, neither Ahmed nor the roughly 34 characters know how to sustain the lunacy. She notes the story by the late Neeraj Vora — co-writer of Rangeela and Hera Pheri — and the dialogues by Farhad Samji echo Mel Brooks' 1967 The Producers in its tax-write-off-flop premise, but the material isn't mined with enough flair, with the disastrous director duo Dev and Das (Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav) and side villain Vindu Dara Singh delivering only middling laughs. Instead of leaning into the showbiz spoofing, Ahmed throws everything at the wall — terrorists, a gorilla, a border village to be saved, a little girl planted purely to tug at the heartstrings — leaving the cast so overcrowded that Disha Patani doesn't appear to have a single line in the first half. Anupama's THR Bottomline: despite the fun premise and gargantuan star cast, Welcome to the Jungle is more slapdash than sparkling. You can watch Welcome to the Jungle at a theatre near you.
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