Welcome to the Jungle Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
The gang is back and so is the chaos, for better and worse. Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, Suniel Shetty, Arshad Warsi, Raveena Tandon, and half of Bollywood show up to make noise in the third Welcome film — and some of it is genuinely, helplessly funny.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Director: Ahmed Khan
Release: June 26, 2026
Language: Hindi
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Arshad Warsi, Paresh Rawal, Raveena Tandon, Jackie Shroff, Rajpal Yadav, Farida Jalal, Disha Patani, Jacqueline Fernandez, Lara Dutta, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade, Aftab Shivdasani, Johnny Lever, Krushna Abhishek, Kiku Sharda, Daler Mehndi, Mika Singh, Mukesh Tiwari, Yashpal Sharma, Zakir Hussain, Vindu Dara Singh, Urvashi Rautela.
Runtime: ~170 mins
Before anything else, let us be honest about what Welcome to the Jungle is trying to be. It is not trying to be a well-crafted comedy. It is not trying to be smart or subtle or emotionally layered. It is a giant, loud, expensive entertainment machine built to put as many familiar faces on screen as possible and make a packed theatre laugh until they forget to think. Judged on those terms alone — and those terms are the only fair ones here — the film succeeds roughly sixty percent of the time.
That is, frankly, more than most people expected. The setup is a classic Welcome premise wearing a new costume. A corrupt billionaire needs to launder black money, so he funds the most expensive bad film in history. Director duo Dev and Das — played with brilliant comic timing by Rajpal Yadav and Paresh Rawal — take the assignment and assemble a cast.
Akshay Kumar plays Rajeev, a washed-up action star working in Bhojpuri films who sees this as his comeback. Suniel Shetty and Arshad Warsi show up as gangster brothers — stand-ins for the original Uday and Majnu — who muscle their way into the production with their own agenda. Then the production moves to a real jungle, real terrorists appear, and the film-within-a-film crew gets mistaken for the Indian Army. It is completely absurd. That is the point.
The first half works considerably better than the second. Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav carry the early stretches with a chemistry that feels like two old friends competing at being funny, which is exactly what it is. The Hera Pheri gang energy between Akshay, Paresh, and Rajpal is the film’s most reliable asset — every time the three of them are in the same scene, the jokes land with something approaching actual craft.
Raveena Tandon, as a villager waiting to be rescued, storms into the second half and immediately makes everything around her more entertaining. Her scene with Akshay — a meta exchange about how long the village has been waiting for him — is the best moment in the entire film. It works because it knows exactly what it is doing. Farida Jalal as Badi Bi and Kiran Kumar as Murad Chacha together produce the kind of old-school comic timing that the rest of the film is loudly chasing and rarely catching.
The problems begin to pile up as the film stretches past the two-hour mark.
The screenplay keeps changing direction without warning. One minute it is slapstick comedy, the next it is a patriotic war film with terrorists and snow-capped mountains and Urdu poetry. The plot accumulates subplots the way a magnet accumulates metal filings — endlessly, without much discrimination. Every new celebrity entry stops feeling like a surprise and starts feeling like attendance.
The women, particularly Disha Patani and Jacqueline Fernandez, are thoroughly wasted. The film is aware of this — there is an actual scene where Jacqueline’s character is told she is there for glamour — but acknowledging a problem is not the same as fixing it.
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The climax runs significantly longer than it should, and the humour dries up well before the story decides to end.
And yet. People around you will laugh. You will probably laugh too, more than you expected to going in. The original Welcome worked because it had writing underneath the madness. This one mostly has movement. But the movement is occasionally very funny, and sometimes that is enough.
Go in with low expectations and a large popcorn.
Welcome to the Jungle is now playing in cinemas.