Movie Review: Welcome to the Jungle

What made the 2008 film Tropic Thunder funny was that it was willing to mock Hollywood and its star system using its biggest stars. Robert Downey Jr was brilliant, if flagrantly offensive as the method actor with Blackface, with Tom Cruise delivering the best cameo of his life as a megalomaniac producer.

In Welcome to the Jungle, Akshay Kumar tries to replicate that sense of self mockery, playing a flop hero reduced to doing Bhojpuri films, having lost the love of his life, and most of his dignity. Enter two filmmakers, Dev and Das, tasked with making a flop so that their financier can show losses and evade taxes. Kumar goes with his band of actors into the jungle, which happens to be a village called Azadganj on the India-Pakistan border. They are supposed to engage in a fake war to save the village from fake terrorists but of course it is Kashmir so the guns have to be real. The villagers, including Raveena Tandon, Farida Jalal and Kiran Kumar, help the fake soldiers fight the real terrorists with real guns, and eventually real soldiers. Confused? So was I.