Release date:
|
September 4, 2015
|
Director:
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Anees Bazmee
|
Cast:
Language:
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Anil Kapoor, Nana Patekar,
Shruti Haasan, Paresh Rawal, Dimple Kapadia, Ankita
Shrivastava, John Abraham, Naseeruddin Shah,
Shiney Ahuja
Hindi
|
There
is just one way to make an entertaining slapstick comedy: with these two
ingredients: unabashedness in your commitment to mindlessness and actors with
great timing.
Welcome Back
– directed and co-written by Anees Bazmee – is silly and it knows it. And it
ain’t apologising for it. It also stars some great comedians.
Thank
goodness on both fronts, because the film is a hoot.
Welcome Back
is a sequel to 2007’s Welcome by the
same director. Truth be told, it’s a shameless reworking of the exact same template
that succeeded eight years back. It could have ended up feeling like a desperate
cliché but is not, because the recycling bears a self-mocking tone, the dialogues
are hilarious, the leads – Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar – are in full form and the
cast has been intelligently used (except for Dimple Kapadia who is wasted).
Welcome
was about gangsters Uday Shetty (Nana) and Majnu (Anil) who are close friends.
Both are anxious to get hitched but insist on getting Uday’s younger sister Sanjana
(Katrina Kaif) married first. They fix her up with Rajiv (Akshay Kumar), the
nephew of Dr Ghungroo (Paresh Rawal). Sanjana and Rajiv fall in love, unaware
of their families’ plans. Also in the picture: a super-glam young woman called Ishika
pretending to be in love with both Uday and Majnu, who in turn are genuinely smitten
by her. Enter: the dangerous don RDX and his son Lucky.
Cut
to 2015. A now reformed Uday Bhai and Majnu Bhai are trying to be respectable hoteliers
in Dubai. They are still desperate to get married. Sanjana is gone but this
time their marriage plans are thwarted by the discovery of another sister
called Ranjana (Shruti Haasan). Unknown to them, Ranjana falls in love with
Ajay/Ajju Bhai (John Abraham) who is the man they intended for her in the first
place. Also in the picture: a super-glam young woman (Ankita Shrivastava)
who Uday and Majnu both fall in love with; she in turn pretends to be in love
with both of them. Enter: the dangerous don Wanted Bhai (Naseeruddin Shah) and
his son Honey (Shiney Ahuja).
As
I said, it’s the EXACT SAME TEMPLATE!!!
And
though that is what makes it unmemorable, it is great fun while it lasts!
The
reason, I guess, is that Anees Bazmee is wise enough to know exactly why the
first film was a hit – Welcome was
promoted as an Akshay film with Katrina as his romantic interest but it was, in
truth, an Anil-Nana enterprise and they were to-die-for in the film. We knew
already that Anil is excellent with comedy, but this was a side of Nana that
Hindi audiences had not seen. Akshay and Kat were given the least to do while
the spotlight remained fixed firmly on the veterans.
That’s
what we get in Welcome Back too: Anil-Nana
as the focal point, not John (contrary to what the poster suggests) or Shruti. It’s only fair to say though that John is evolving
in comedy – in Welcome Back and 2011’s
Desi Boyz, he is miles ahead of his
performance in 2005’s Garam Masala. It
is also important to point out that in the universe of this franchise where women are lesser beings, newcomer Ankita was
probably cast primarily for how good she looks in a bikini but she reveals a comedic
gene in the limited space she gets.
Admittedly a couple of the songs in the film are unnecessary, and all the songs have ordinary tunes. Some compensation for the ordinariness comes in the form of those nuttily garish costumes and Nana’s lack of inhibitions about his really bad dancing. The special effects in the over-stretched climax are sub-par, but by then Welcome Back had cracked me up so relentlessly, that I did not care. The thing that killed me throughout the film though was Anil’s body.
Hehe,
it’s not what you are thinking (though he does have an enviable waistline).
What I mean is that some actors cannot even sustain an accent through the
duration of a film; Anil, on the other hand, does not let up even for a second on
his ridiculously sloping shoulders and gait.
The
nicest thing about Welcome Back is
that it is, for the most part, inoffensive. Lazy humour writers take potshots
at groups in a socially weak position. Sexist jokes about women, gay jokes,
jokes about persons with disabilities and (in India) jokes about dark skin are so
easy to do. We all have our own Lakshman
rekhas – I’m not looking for Yes Minister-level
quality in a slapstick comedy, but even within the slapstick arena, for me the
line is drawn at rape jokes (which I find repugnant) and the nauseatingly
caricatured homosexual man of numerous Hindi films. Welcome Back features neither of the above. It does needlessly
resort to one wisecrack about dark skin, but that gag is so fleeting and the
rest are so innocuous, that the film marks a refreshing change from the misogynistic
and homophobic clichés Bollywood comedy often delivers.
Welcome Back
is a brazen ode to stupidity and though it’s forgettable, I had a good time while
I watched it. I’m not sure what I liked most: the ludicrous dialogues, Nana’s terrible
dancing, Paresh stealing scenes in a brief role (sadly, Naseer is just so-so)
or Rajpal Yadav spoofing PK. This I can say for sure: watching Anil Kapoor in
full flow is worth the price of booking an entire theatre, especially for that crazy
scene in which his Majnu Bhai plays antakshari
in a cemetery.
If
you must do slapstick, then THIS is how it’s done.
Rating
(out of five): **3/4
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U/A
|
Running time:
|
154 minutes
|
