Subhash Kapoor has two discernible reasons to make a new Jolly LLB movie: to air his concerns about the neglect of Indian farmers, and bring together the two actors who played the lawyer Jolly in the previous two films. In both respects, Jolly LLB 3 fulfils the brief, at its most basic.

Jolly from Meerut (Arshad Warsi) and Jolly from Kanpur (Akshay Kumar) find themselves practising in the same court in Delhi, much to the horror of the long-suffering judge Sunder Lal Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla). Sunder Lal would rather knock off kilos than be in the same courtroom as the squabbling Jollys.

After a barely convincing rivalry, the bumbling but honest advocates join forces against the crooked businessman Haribhai Khaitan (Gajraj Rao). Haribhai is trying to steamroll opposition to a luxury residential project that he wants to build in rural Rajasthan. Standing in the way of the “Bikaner to Boston” project is the elderly widow Janki (Seema Biswas).

Haribhai hires top lawyer Vikram (Ram Kapoor) to argue his case, whose thrust is that development must proceed at the speed of a bullet train. While Jolly LLB 3 is dramatically the weakest of the three films in the series, Subhash Kapoor’s script gets away with a great deal of anti-establishment messaging, including supporting...

Read more