Welcome to the Jungle Is a Pure Nightmare

i do not usually review movies here, but welcome to the jungle earned it, mostly as a warning. before anything else, look at the two names behind it. director: ahmed khan, the man who gave us baaghi 2, baaghi 3, heropanti 2. writer: farhad samji, whose greatest hits include housefull 5, bachchan pandey, kisi ka bhai kisi ki jaan, and roughly half the baaghi movies. you read that list and you already know what you are in for. i am going to tell you anyway.

i grew up on the first welcome, the anees bazmee one, uday and majnu and paresh rawal, that whole world. i walked in genuinely hoping this would land even ten percent of that. what a massacre it turned out to be.

here is the thing you have to sit with: there is no story. no structure. the film has no head, no legs, no middle. it is a concept, and the concept is, put thirty-something similar actors on a screen and let them do something funny. that is the entire movie. i am not exaggerating.

the setup, such as it is: akshay plays a failed actor cast in a film that is designed to flop, because the producer actually wants the money to sink, two thousand crore of it. and then they take the whole cast to a location and just leave them there. the funniest part is the movie tells on itself. paresh rawal and rajpal yadav play the in-film directors, and their whole plan is, we have put cameras everywhere in the village, do whatever you want, we will film it. that is not just the plot. that is exactly how this movie got made.

also, why is it called welcome to the jungle. there is no jungle. it is an open field with a soft little set you can see the edges of. nobody involved seems to know either.

now the actual crime, and it is a technical one. this thing was shot around 2023, sat on hold for a long time because of behind-the-scenes trouble, and by the time it came back they could not get the actors' dates again. so what you are watching is frankenstein. no shot is longer than two seconds. i will believe you if you can point me to a single scene that runs longer. two characters talking face to face, and there is a cut in the middle of the exchange, positions changed, before either of them can even react. it is so jarring it took me an actual hour just to visually accept the film.

once your eyes adjust you start seeing the seams. jackie shroff on a horse, akshay dancing around trying to please him, and jackie's reaction shots are him looking dead into the camera going achha, aur kya kar sakte ho. fourth wall, except it is not a bit, it is patchwork, dropped in because they did not have the real coverage. that trick was embarrassing in 2005. random reaction shots of random characters, everywhere, for no reason.

here is where i want to be fair, because i did not walk in to blindly hate it. the actors are genuinely good. when you laugh in this movie, and you will, once or twice, it is not the writing. it is akshay, arshad warsi, sunil shetty, johnny lever, paresh rawal, rajpal yadav simply being very good at their jobs. akshay in particular is trying, his timing is sharp, a few of his lines actually land. everyone is giving a hundred percent. it is the writing underneath them that is pathetic.

and the film has no idea what to do with all these people. tushar kapoor is in the entire second half and you will not feel his presence once, because he has nothing to say. mukesh tiwari and yashpal sharma, the men who were brilliant in gangaajal, do not get four dialogues between them. disha patani is in the movie, and if you asked her why, she would not know. my honest hypothesis is that the writers had a gag in their head, decided one specific actor could sell it, and cast them for ten seconds without once asking what the character is doing in the story. there is no story, so the question has no answer.

and the gags loop. give a character a funny trait, the guy whose words will not come out when he gets excited, sure, it is funny the first time. it is not funny the twenty-fifth time in twenty minutes. that is a writing failure, not an acting one, because the actors sell it every single time.

i have to tell you about the interval, because it is the whole film in one moment. it cuts to interval, you stand up to go to the bathroom, and akshay walks onto the screen holding a bucket of popcorn and says, i know you are about to leave, but disha and i shot a song we did not know where to put in the movie, so we are putting it here, watch it. and then they play it. an entire song they filmed with nowhere to put it, dumped at the interval. now imagine how long the rest of the movie must be.

the vfx is ai, the cavalry, the landscapes, the whole army riding down on the village. that is normal now and i am not really angry about it, except if you are going to do it, at least buy the good subscription so it looks real. it does not.

the theatre was full and people were laughing, and i laughed a couple of times too, so maybe it finds its crowd. i told you what i liked and what i did not. it does not move the verdict. this is a skip. a high skip. the actors deserved a movie. this was not one.

one concept, thirty actors, no film. that is the review.

— arsh