Movie Review - Jump Jilani (Telugu) - String of mindless gags!!

When your reputation becomes a cast iron straitjacket, you can never come out it, or doesn’t want to come out of it. Now, Allari Naresh is also infected with a bug of dubious distinction. He lives in a cocoon believing that the audience only accepts him in typified buffoonery, but lest he knows that they got bogged with a repetitive dose of the same. His latest outing, Jump Jilani too gets into the rinse and repeat mode and hits the replay button of many of his previous films, which were much better than this one.

Jump Jilani is a remake of Tamil film Kalakalappu, which in turn is loosely based on German comedy Soul Kitchen. In Telugu version, the story is set in Nididavolu, where Sattibabu (Allari Naresh) tries to keep the fire burning in the kitchen of his famous ancestral restaurant Satyanarayana Vilas. To achieve this arduous task, he runs from pillar to post looking for money to make ends meet. He is smitten by Madhavi (Isha Chawla), a health inspector, who serves a notice to his restaurant for not maintaining proper standards.

In the meanwhile, Ram Babu – a con man and identical twin of Satti Babu – joins the family and falls for his maradalu Ganga (Swathi Deekshit). Then multiple subplots ranging from a hunt for lost diamonds to greed of someone to acquire Satti Babu’s restaurant to one-upmanship in politics get added to this main plot leading to a comedy of errors.

The main problem with Jump Jilani is that it’s a Pandora’s Box sans Hope. Just for filling the ecosystem with an overdose of laughter, director E. Satti Babu focuses more on the comic part and leaves the main plot in lurch. He tries to balance two genres of comedy by pumping loads of slapstick and creating countless quirky characters, many of those appear at the drop of the hat pulling off a blink and miss sort of roles. In other words, the movie seems like a generic product made to accommodate every comedian except Brahmanandam.

Allari Naresh does a dual role but there isn’t much of contrast between the two. They sport a different hairdo and their characters are well contrived in the beginning, but when the movie reaches interval they both act in unison leaving no strain of distinction. Isha Chawla needs to work on her expressions and histrionics whereas Swathi Deekshit never comes out of her glamorous shell.

Posani stretches his character to good effect and carries the second half of the film with poise. Though dishing out a routine fare of gags, he is crackling with great comic timing and intermittent use of double entendre. However, like in many other films, even his character falls prey to clichés of a henchman trying to apprise about hero’s intention of eloping with his would be bride, but he giving a deaf ear to it.

There are no massive takeaways in the technical departments. The music is mediocre and the glossy songs do more damage to the narrative. You can’t search for logic in a mindless comic caper but when you overdo spoofs on famous heroes and mouth rehashed versions of their popular punch dialogues, there’s nothing much one can do than to bleed from boredom. 

My Rating: Expectation - 6/10; Reality - 4/10 

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.
An edited version of this piece can be found here.