Bollywood director Anees Bazmee’s Welcome Back is a rara avis.

A feculent atrocity completely unfit for viewing by normal humans (Indians excepted).

But given the insatiable appetite of our Bollywood fans for numbing crap, I fear this Friday’s nightmare will turn into a decent hit (despite the absence of A-list stars).

Zip, Nada, Nothing

I will confess to liking director Bazmee’s decade-old No Entry.

But this oaf has been careening downhill since with the likes of Welcome, Ready, Singh is Kinng, Thank You etc.

Bazmee has reached the apogee of trash in Welcome Back, a sequel (kinda) to his 2008 trash-hit Welcome.

The lengthy horror (155-minutes) that’s Welcome Back left me in a daze!

Incoherence and incompetence jostle for supremacy in Welcome Back.

Nana Patekar, Anil Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, Rajpal Yadav and Naseeruddin Shah are class acts, powerhouses of talent. No less than the best of Hollywood!

To see these acting stalwarts bend over and prostitute themselves for a few silver coins in an effrontery like Welcome Back is depressing.

Are good roles so scarce for genuine talent in Bollywood?

Mumbai dons Uday Shetty (Nana Patekar) and Majnu (Anil Kapoor) have sloughed off their bad, bad ways and turned respectable businessmen in Welcome Back.

But not in Mera Bharat Mahaan. The dons have shifted base to highrise sheikhdom Dubai (film subsidies??) where they’ve turned hoteliers.

When withdrawal symptoms hit, Majnu pines for the good ol’ days and whines that he’d have had three or four Al-Qedas of his own if only they hadn’t abandoned their bad ways.

Thanks to his father’s continuing priapic (mis)adventures, Uday Shetty is foisted with another sister Ranjana (Shruti Hassan), a college student in Mumbai, whose entry on the screen is a harbinger of agonizing minutes ahead.

A merciless Bazmee ups the pain quotient by introducing local thug Ajju bhai (John Abraham) as Ranjana’s ‘lipping’ lover! Ajju bhai’s claim to fame is that he knows 2006 ways to break 206 bones of his foes.

Shruti Hassan and John Abraham are to acting what ISIS is to Ahimsa. Like ISIS, this duo leave behind unmentionable carnage in their wake.

I concede all’s par for the course in a comedy. But Welcome Back ain’t no comedy, just a futile, crass, badly scripted attempt at it.

The antics of Dimple Kapadia and some skimpily clad asylum escapee named Ankita Shrivastava as a Maharani and her Princess daughter respectively pentupled my pain!

Both aging bachelors Uday and Majnu fall for the nubile princess triggering more tedium in this badly written drivel.

Maid rapist Shiney Ahuja is back on the screen as the junkie son Honey of blind super don Wanted Bhai (Naseeruddin Shah) who seems lost in the melee.

In the 155-minute film there were a couple of dialogs (by Paresh Rawal’s character Dr.Ghungroo) that evoked a smile. But the laugh lines were few and far between, not enough value for the $9.50 I forked out.

Horrible Writing

The single biggest flaw of Welcome Back is the lax attention to the writing (director Bazmee is co-author of the ‘story’ and ‘screenplay’).

Given the shabby writing, even acting exemplars like Nana Patekar, Paresh Rawal and Naseeruddin Shah are reduced to moronic strutting and shrieking.

Bad as this entire atrocity is, the last 20-minutes of Welcome Back are straight from hell with a bunch of killer drones, an army of crappy CGI camels and a desert storm until Bazmee summons the compassion to say ‘Enough.’