Welcome To New York is supposedly a comedy in which Teji (Daljit) and Jeenat Patel (Sobakshi) get a chance to become a part of IIFA awards being held in New York and the chaos ensues. Its a spoof on “behind the scenes “ of the awards functions.
Teji is a recovery agent by profession and a wannabe actor from Ludhiana. Jeenat is a gujju girl and a fashion designer from Vadodara. With all the” Munda Punjab da “and “kudi Gujarat di “antics,the writer Dheeraj Rattan must have visualised his lead couple to be all funny and cute. He writes his script filling in all village simpleton kinda gags for Teji and all fiery “ daant tod ke haath mei “ kinda ghisa pita dialogues for Jeenat with a typical gujju accent.
There’s Lara Dutta, the event management honcho who wants to mess up the awards function to get back at Boman Irani ,the owner of the company organising the awards. Karan plays himself i.e Kjo and a double role of a look-alike gangster.
What follows is chaos onstage and backstage and obviously in our life too ,at least for those horrific 2.5 hours.
The dialogues are pathetic and gag absolutely flat. Music too is no relief in spite of voices like Rahat, Mika and Daljit. Songs just crop up after regular intervals often unnecessarily. One song by Rahat had such mismatched lyrics as per the situation that I wonder if they just picked up the songs from a song bank and fitted into the movie.
The movie is nothing but IIFA awards promotion with half the coverage picked up from actual awards and fitted into the scenes shot for the movie. Director Chakri Toleti deserves kudos for making the worst possible movie using a pretty good star cast.
Lara and Boman look good in whatever they are doing but to no avail. There ‘s no scope of redemption any which ways . Sonakshi , being the brand ambassador of Gujarat, laden with all that silver jewellery and accent, adorning indo westerns, looks nothing but a pretty face. Its sad to see Daljit in this mindless role after his superb performance in Udta Punjab. Lot many cameos by Ritesh, Rana Dagubatti, Salman, Sohail, Arbaaz, Aditya Roy Kapoor seem like temporary reliefs.
And I wonder whats Karan obsession with playing a negative role. Why can’t he get it once and for all that he’s better off behind the camera, shouting “ action “ instead of being in action? He is such a bad actor playing even himself, let alone a villain. Such is his penchant for pouting that he can’t help but pout even when he’s supposed to be giving menacing looks. He’s so much worse than what he was in Bombay Velvet. ( After all Chakri Toleti is no Anurag Kashyap )
Over All, the movie is completely and strictly a No No, unless you want to be a part of history that got created in making a movie so bad that it surpasses the highest degree of awfulness.
Score 3 on 10