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For a comedy that is more a talkie than a walkie, the lines people speak here are unspeakable. The entire film is shot in the hotels and grand homes of billionaires in the United Arab Emirates and much of the conversation is as crude as the oil India imports from that nation. The ‘tapori’ language of Mumbai sounds awful enough in the city of its origin, but spoken in seven star luxury, amidst sand dunes and Ferraris and yachts, it almost makes you throw up.

Welcome was a multi-starrer film that had its moments of glamour and fun. About gangsters from Mumbai anxious to temporarily dump their criminal baggage to get a sister married, it was written with a certain verve. Here, in this sequel, we are minus Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif and Mallika Sherawat. So a yawning gap in the casting department and a precipitous decline in the writing department leave us to sink in the quicksand of the Arabian desert. The same gangsters, Uday (Nana Patekar) and Majnu (Anil Kapoor), appear, but now they have reformed and are in the hotel business in Dubai. Magically, Uday conjures up a step-sister he needs to see married (Shruti Haasan), in order that the same set of comic capers can continue. In equal whimsy, Dr Ghungroo (Paresh Rawal) says that another son that he didn’t know he had, a young Mumbai Don called Ajju Bhai (John Abraham), has turned up mysteriously.

Ajju Bhai arrives in Dubai to do what he refers to in tapori language as ‘lipping’—kissing Shruti Haasan on the lips. Meanwhile, yet another ‘bhai’, simply called Wanted Bhai (Naseeruddin Shah) turns up blind and senile to inflict his demented son (the rehabilitated actor Shiny Ahuja) on our consciousness. The entry of Shah into this dreadful movie is the blow that brings you to your knees: ‘Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar!’

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Ajit Duara