The latest trend of making sequels and getting a huge advantage of the brand-value created by its original film has clearly given a new life to some directors, evidently seen in the past few years. And riding on the success achieved by WELCOME in 2007, here comes its sequel WELCOME BACK that desperately tries to repeat the same box office results with an overstuffed, bad script that marginally gets supported by some good dialogues and key performances generating only a few enjoyable moments coming at long intervals.
Assuming the viewers, ready to accept a comedy just because of its big star-cast, lavish foreign locations and a well-designed publicity campaign, WELCOME BACK clearly follows the typical Bollywood pattern of churning out mindless comedies and denies trying anything novel in terms of narration, characterization or storytelling whatsoever. Moreover following the same old clichéd approach, the silliest feature of the film remains the amazing fact that they have actually made a sequel on almost the same storyline with a few added sub-plots just for the sake of addition. And thus offer ‘everything seen before’ in terms of content (plot) despite having all highly entertaining characters led by Majnu Bhai.
The film begins with a quite energy-less title music and then the same calmly continues in the entire first half with three songs including an item number with absurd lyrics as, “Main Babli Hui Tu Bunty Hua, Band Kamrey Mein Twenty Twenty Hua". Still one doesn’t mind watching it all expecting a much compensating second half, only to find it even worse than the first to be precise. In other words, after the senseless crows declare the intermission (competing with the pigeons of the prequel) the film simply offers nothing except a fairly enjoyable sequence at the graveyard in its second half and then has a highly childish and illogically conceived climax truly forcing you to wonder that “How on earth did anybody find the guts to spend 100 big crores on this insane mess?”
In the technical department, the DOP successfully manages to give it a grand look but the background score constantly keeps pulling it backwards with a quite lifeless arrangement. Music has nothing great to write about in spite of the famous catchy phrase of its title track, whereas the well written dialogues keep trying hard to deliver the expected entertainment at intervals generating the much awaited laughs.
Coming to the performances WELCOME BACK becomes barely watchable because of Anil Kapoor alone who probably has forgotten to grow old since many years. The ‘Jhakaas man’ is just perfect playing the entertaining Majnu bhai but both Nana Patekar and Paresh Rawal are only there to provide the much needed continuity in a sequel. Besides the two major replacements as John Abraham in place of Akshay Kumar and Naseeruddin Shah instead of the charismatic Feroz Khan, turn out to be quite poor choices made falling flat right from the word go unarguably. Plus it was quite sad to see Dimple Kapadia and Shiney Ahuja playing two stupid characters along with the unimpressive Shruti Hassan and Ankita Shrivastava only there to fulfill the glamour requirement
In all, if only a few enjoyable scenes here and there in a 150 minutes (tediously) long film, shot lavishly in Dubai, with a completely lackluster background score as well as poor soundtrack, supported by only one enjoyable act from Majnu Bhai, ending with some surprisingly amateurish computer graphics excites you well then the choice is all yours, otherwise just wait till you get to see it on a leading TV channel after a couple of months.
Interestingly after watching its ridiculous finale CGI sequence (strangely ending on an open note), I just got reminded of a simple Android app shown by my young nephew, creating much better explosive graphics at a simple click known as FX GURU. So to have some fun, do try it on your phones or watch the amazing results on fxguruapp.com at your computer screens, forgetting all about the film that can easily be summed up as "Mazaaq Tha Bhai Mazaaq".
Ratings : 1.5 / 5
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