'Jolly LLB 3' Movie Review: Arshad Warsi, Akshay Kumar Team Up In The Franchise's Weakest Outing

Is Subhash Kapoor the last surviving socialist of Hindi cinema? With Jaideep Sahni in semi-retirement, and belligerents like Dibakar Banerjee put out to pasture, all hope seems to rest with Kapoor. His Jolly LLB movies are animated by a public spirit that doesn’t feel condescending or blasé. Kapoor knows how and when to play it safe, which explains the franchise’s longevity. In a Bollywood that now panders openly to the status quo, these films whisper, if not directly speak, inconvenient truths to power.

The latest entry, Jolly LLB 3, is the most urgently confrontational Kapoor has ever made. It is also, I’m sorry to report, the weakest link in the franchise. The satirical silliness of the previous two films — terrorists dressed as monks, an impromptu musical match in court — is given short shrift in Jolly LLB 3; weighty intentions halt the film’s stride. Arshad Warsi and Akshay Kumar return as the homonymous Jollys in a comedy bogged down by messaging and meaning. It’s that most frustrating kind of movie-going deal—agreeable politics hamstrung by a shaky screenplay.

The setup is instantly exciting. Advocates Jagdish Tyagi (Warsi) and Jagdishwar Mishra (Kumar) are now practising in the same court in Delhi. They have reverted to their former, wheedling selves: Jagdishwar, who claims to be the ‘Original Jolly’, gets by pinching clients from his namesake, leading to frequent scraps and blow-ups. Kapoor brings back other faces from the franchise. Certain old quirks are retained (Huma Qureshi as Jagdishwar’s wife Pushpa still enjoys her drink), while others are freshly infused: Sundar Lal Tripathi, the fan-favourite judge played by Saurabh Shukla, is now a fitness buff.

The battle-of-wits between the two Jollys soon gives way, predictably, for a combined mission. Together, they take up the cause of a woman named Janaki (Seema Biswas), whose husband — a farmer — died by suicide. The film is ostensibly inspired by events from 2011, when distressed farmers in Uttar Pradesh stood up to the State government’s land acquisition policies. The site of conflict, here, is changed to Rajasthan, though Kapoor — in invoking MSPs (Minimum Support Prices), crony capitalism and the humbug of development — thematically ties it to more recent upheavals in Northern India.

Gajraj Rao is low-key effective as a scowling billionaire. Despite featuring two leads of comparable comic skill, Jolly LLB 3 never becomes the uproarious two-hander it was made out to be. A couple of promotional songs had me expecting a dance-off between Kumar and Warsi—instead, we are fobbed off with a forced and forgettable fight in the court complex. A later action sequence seemed to belong in a wholly different Akshay Kumar film. Warsi, as always, is a sport, yet why bring him back if the heftier dramatic moments will be reserved for the shinier star? In a film that preaches fairness and equity, this feels disingenuous.

A mark of a great satire—from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro to Peepli Live to Court—is how seamlessly the comic and the tragic interweave. In Jolly LLB 3, the humour often feels divorced from the core issues being raised. You can label off scenes as ‘funny’ or ‘serious’, instead of an absurdist admixture of both. There is a running track, for instance, about the widower Tripathi’s dating life—it’s funny on its own terms, yet never clicks in place with the rest of the film.

Rangarajan Ramabadran's (12th Fail, Shikara) cinematography is plainly professional. Kapoor does not take too many wild swings—one exception is the near-fantastical interval block, with Kumar and Warsi running camel-drawn chariots on a modern racetrack, a dystopian hippodrome of our twisted age. I also chuckled at the sight of a television presenter perched on a bulldozer’s blade as he reports from a protest site. It’s silly, winning details like these that ultimately sell an argument, get an unsuspecting audience member thinking. Who knows, maybe they even change minds?