Welcome Back

Anees Bazmee's "Welcome Back" is a textbook case of a director operating on autopilot, banking entirely on the goodwill of two bankable stars to carry an exhausted, derivative script across the finish line. The premise—reformed criminals getting conned by fake royals—had potential for sharp satire, but instead we get a bloated, meandering mess that mistakes volume for comedy. John Abraham and Anil Kapoor do their best with tired material, playing off each other with enough chemistry to occasionally crack a smile, but no amount of star power can salvage a narrative this creaky. The women playing the con artists are reduced to glorified props, their supposed intelligence never matching their actions, and the pivots into Ranjana's wedding drama feel like three different scripts glued together with duct tape and desperation.

What really grates is how the film wants to have it both ways—framing its heroes as sympathetic antiheroes while also expecting us to root for them in increasingly ridiculous situations. Ajju's sudden appearance as a menacing goon should've created genuine tension, but Bazmee treats even this dramatic escalation as just another setup for loud, unfunny sequences. The direction is utterly pedestrian, with no visual flair or comedic timing to speak of. Every scene overstays its welcome, padding runtime with repetitive exchanges and slapstick that landed better when Charlie Chaplin was doing it. The film's box office success (₹167.37 crores) says more about mark