Even the media is partly responsible for this phenomenon. In the industry, people keep telling you not to make such films and they blame it on the audience - that they won’t get it. But, one cannot master this unless one tries. Nuanced work can easily go wrong even if the maker has his or her soul in the right place. How difficult was it to deal with that aspect? To touch upon so many issues also bears the potential risk of making it clumsy. Jolly LLB succeeds in capturing the times we live in through these small touches. And cinema - a form of literature today - should also do so. Literature isn’t mere storytelling but also gives a sense of time and place.
They don’t get into their relationship to focus on their equation but it’s presented by-the-way while Jolly and his wife Pushpa (Huma Qureshi) discuss the case. For instance, the reference to the fact that the Supreme Court will have a hearing in the middle of the night for special cases, as it did in the Yakub Memon case, or the scene where Jolly (Akshay Kumar) is shown cooking for his family. It is the fine display of histrionics by all these refined actors, which makes the movie, worth seeing.The film effortlessly touches upon several issues without steering away from the story or the script. Huma and Annu are also compelling enough. In top-form, he puts up a perfect display of a street-smart lawyer who hasn’t read legal tomes but who has instead picked up tips from courtroom corridors to become Jolly LLB. Akshay changes shades from crooked to straight, like a chameleon. But there are portions that seem contrived. Their weighty arguments do educate and entertain to some degree. The maker tries to pack in too much legal diatribe between Jolly and his adversary, the topnotch, Pramod Mathur(Annu Kapoor), in Judge Tripathy’s (Saurabh Shukla, delightful as always) Lucknow courtroom. Post interval though, the film hits a pause button at times. The film also provides the right dose of action inside and outside the courtroom. The plot has enough laugh-out-loud situations and emotional outbursts to keep you invested especially in the razor-sharp first half. While the last instalment dealt with a hit-n-run case, this one deals with the case of mistaken identity of a J & K terrorist.
Writer-director Subhash Kapoor who has studied India’s burgeoning legal system of `I-will-see-you-in-court’, definitely knows as much about the Indian Penal Code as most legal sharks because of his deep study of the subject.
Overlook some of the minor flaws and you have a 140-minute solid entertainer on your hands. He makes you remember Warsi, but also adds his touch to Jolly. And Akshay Kumar ensures that you keep laughing at regular intervals. Overemphasis on melodrama also hampers a well though-out central idea. Here, Annu Kapoor gives Akshay Kumar a solid run for his money. It’s only in the second half that Jolly LLB 2 comes back to a prolonged courtroom battle and gives its actors a chance to rise and shine.
This way the pace is maintained, but the theme is ignored. The most effective scenes are cut short to pave way for action scenes. Also, the movie appears confused between a satire and a thriller. It starts to appear like a mix of many films. This is where the screenplay decides to do away with the fantastic research done by the film’s team. We somehow know that there’s no escaping the wrath of poor judges and a broken system. Mostly the joke is on Jolly, and sometimes it’s on us. Large chunks of the film remind the viewer of those legal satire shows where the judicial system looks like a big, dark joke.