‘Welcome to the Jungle’ Movie Review: Akshay Kumar Saves A Meta Bollywood Caper From Itself

Welcome to the Jungle is that attention-seeking kid in class who loves playing the fool so much that not even he can tell when he accidentally sounds funny and smart. Ahmed Khan’s crowded action-comedy is staged as the third film in the Welcome franchise, but it’s really just Tropic Thunder given the Farah Khan treatment. Ben Stiller’s 2008 satire about four vain actors who inadvertently invite real-world dangers during a guerilla film shoot in a jungle is ‘adapted’ into a Bollywood caper about an incompetent movie crew who get mistaken for the Indian army during a patriotic shoot in a crisis-stricken border village. The meta-ness is the main character, of course. There’s Akshay Kumar self-referencing his Khiladi and Mohra days, Suniel Shetty named ‘Anna’ Shetty, Raveena Tandon taunting Kumar for “20 years of neglection,” Arshad Warsi paraphrasing his own Jolly LLB lines, Jackie Shroff as a kohl-eyed terrorist, Farida Jalal playing a dramatic old mother India whose ‘dialogue’ nobody understands, Jacqueline Fernandez as an airheaded blonde, and so on.

Whereas Tropic Thunder sent up everything from method acting to war-movie tropes, Welcome to the Jungle spoofs its own ilk: tax-evasion projects disguised as jingoistic spectacles, opportunistic filmmakers, exes working together, spineless stars who magically grow a conscience, film industries preying on the anxieties of a nation, and the formula of box-office success. The premise is localised. A billionaire on the brink of tax fraud decides to fund a movie on a ‘paltry’ budget of 2000 crore. The catch is that it has to be a massive flop. So he hires the most mediocre team possible: a director-duo named Dev (Paresh Rawal) and Das (Rajpal Yadav) who cite Dhurandhar as their blueprint, a failed actor (Akshay Kumar) who became a Bhojpuri item dancer, a visually challenged cameraman (Shreyas Talpade), two gangsters (Suniel Shetty, Arshad Warsi) who insist on being the parallel heroes, the producer’s daughter (Jacqueline Fernandez) as a nepo-hire, a storyline about Indian military heroes rescuing a broken village from Pakistani extremists, and an obnoxiously expensive schedule. But the goal-posts shift. An IT raid means that the billionaire suddenly needs his film to wrap in one day and become a blockbuster. The directors decide to airdrop the crew into a live war-torn location at the border; the desperate villagers think the actors are real, and the oblivious actors think the villagers are fake. Chaos ensues, naturally, when actual terrorists invade and the actual army gets involved.

I’d like to believe that Welcome to the Jungle recognises the irony of being a movie about the production of a bad Hindi movie. I’m not sure it does, especially when its humour sways between low-hanging-fruit and seed-buried-in-ground. Like when a character explains a ‘guerilla’ shoot only for a gorilla to appear. Or when the two Tomb-Raider-styled heroines suggestively moan in pain to distract the male terrorists. Or wordplay that goes: “Your ex is here, but Y?”. Or when the interval features the hero breaking the fourth wall and asking the audience to stay back to watch a song that was edited out. Or even when a film about the artifice of on-screen nationalism resorts to said nationalism in the climax. In fact, you can skip the entire first hour, the Cartoon Network-like setup, of the 165-minute film.

The fun — relatively speaking — only begins once the crew reaches the Om Shanti Om-coded village. Here’s where some self-awareness shows; it almost stops treating the audience as baboons. Like when Kumar’s character, Rajiv, cracks under pressure and admits that he has nothing to do with “desh-bhakti” and “watan”; he’s just a hired entertainer who would happily switch sides to survive. Or the casting of nostalgic ‘90s faces for bit roles that nobody cares about. Or when the gag of multiple characters having ‘communication problems’ keeps working — the old woman whose mumbling is incoherent; the village patriarch who speaks indecipherable Urdu (the dub is so off that it becomes an in-joke); a Johny Lever special where stress often robs him of his voice mid-speech; a missing war hero (and Jawan nod?) with an aura-shattering speech impediment. Or just Akshay Kumar’s reaction shots to these quirks in a high-stakes situation.

Kumar plays Rajiv as a long-overdue expansion of his golden cameos in Om Shanti Om and An Action Hero. Maybe the trick is to have him lampoon himself in movies about movies. No mainstream star has the comic timing of Kumar when he’s switched on and in sync with the material. It’s like he’s calling out other versions of himself; he isn’t afraid to look clumsy and cringey, often shorn of the very vanity that shapes his alt-career. The running gag of Rajiv overacting the moment he sees a camera suits Kumar’s sardonic wit. Welcome to the Jungle stretches its gag of mistaken identities in the second half because he’s able to sell the heck out of it. His tomfoolery even lets the film parody itself the second it gets serious about staple themes like patriotism and morality. 

You know the villagers and their fate will force the film crew to become actual saviours (because when does that ever happen in real life?), but every emotional passage is diffused with a punchline or a ‘defective’ character. It’s almost as if the vintage Welcome template keeps reminding this film that it’s supposed to be a satire on the cinema that commodifies the country rather than a dramedy about the country itself. Again, I’d like to imagine it knows what it’s doing, but it’s kind of endearing that a goofy franchise entry works better in isolation without realising it. That it’s unofficially inspired by a Hollywood hit further supplies the fact that irony is its unwitting protagonist.

For better or worse, it’s a welcome change from the slapstick slop served up by nostalgia merchants these days. That’s the thing about noisy and nonsensical spoofs. There comes a point when the difference between being bad by design and good by genre is negligible. I found myself needing to laugh — not necessarily wanting to — after a while. After all, that attention-seeking kid in class doesn’t give up until his spectators give in. Some react so that he just shuts up; others react so that the voices in their head shut up. Who’s to tell the difference?