At some point during Welcome Back, my spirit left my body and soared up over the heads of the stricken audience in the movie theatre. I looked down at them as they checked their phones, clutched their hair and wished upon Anees Bazmee all the traffic jams Bombay could muster. I could see myself crumpled in a corner, glaring at a neighbor who had the gall to find what was happening on screen funny. Then John Abraham said “Aaj kisses, kal missus”, and I was transported back to the desert of the real.
I’ve never attended journalism school, but I gather one of the things they tell you is not to open a film review with an out of body experience. Then again, who says this is a film? I’ve seen CCTV footage of elevators that’s more cinematic. Slugs inching their way across asphalt have more narrative drive than this. Daylight robberies are funnier.
Bazmee is, of course, no stranger to daylight robberies, having masterminded Ready and Singh Is Kinng and other nefarious schemes to con the public out of their money. He’s also responsible for 2007’s Welcome, in which Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar play gangsters called Majnu and Uday, who pretend to go straight so that they can get their daughter married off to a ‘respectable boy’, the nephew of one Dr. Ghunghroo (Paresh Rawal). In Welcome Back, the joke’s on them (though all jokes are really on the viewer)—another sister, Ranjhana (Shruti Hassan), has to be married off, but the man she’s in love with, Ajju Bhai (John Abraham), is as big a criminal as they used to be (he’s also Ghungroo’s stepson).
Over its cruelly prolonged 150-minute running time, Welcome Back treats human intellect with the sort of disdain that’s remarkable, even for Bollywood. It’s not just that these are old gags; they’ve been repurposed so lazily that you can see the actors tiring of a scene even as they perform it. The screen is dense with characters—in addition to the characters mentioned above, there’s Wanted Bhai (Naseeruddin Shah) and his son Honey (Shiney Ahuja), and a mother-daughter grifter team of Dimple Kapadia and Sakshi Maggo—but the plotting is convoluted and increasingly ridiculous. Abraham, his I’m-so-gorgeous grin an awkward match with his bhai accent, Kapoor and Hassan are locked in a deadly three-way struggle for the crown of the film’s biggest ham, but then Shah enters the picture as the blind Wanted Bhai and walks away with top honours (or dishonours).
If Welcome Back’s crimes against the ear are unforgiveable, almost as grave are its sins against the eye. If there’s a tackier-looking film than this made in the country in the last five years I’m yet to see it. The film’s supposed to be set in Dubai, but it really seems to take place on the sets of a bad jewelry ad from the 1980s. I’m not one to dwell on crimes of fashion—I commit a few of those myself—but Shiney Ahuja’s pink jacket and Sakshi Maggo’s gold-lamé dress should have come with a little advisory, like those no-smoking warnings. The tackiness extends to the special effects: the climactic sequence, which takes place in the desert, has exploding remote-controlled mini-helicopters, two camel stampedes and a dust storm. It also has a blind man regaining his sight, which is ironic, considering Welcome Back is likely to make you want to claw your eyes out.
Welcome Back released in theatres on Friday
