Jolly LLB 3: A Courtroom Comedy Of Errors
Nothing about Jolly LLB 3 feels inspiring or worth watching. The film suffers from confused direction, an overemphasis on its star power, and writing that is both manipulative and complacent.
Promo poster for Jolly LLB 3.
Last Updated: 03.36 AM, Sep 21, 2025
THERE'S A SCENE in the third act of Jolly LLB 3 where a widow, Janki Solanki (Seema Biswas) and a lawyer, Jolly Mishra (Akshay Kumar), are weeping in the waiting room of a hospital. They’ve lost many of their village brothers in a pro-farmer protest against illegal land-grabbing by evil real-estate developers, the Khaitan group. The scene is being mounted as extremely emotional, you know, melancholic background score and all. It’s a classic third-act trope in a story that focuses on the David vs Goliath theme.
The immediate next scene focuses on Judge Sunder Lal Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla) and his extracurricular activities. He’s newly into fitness, having lost a few kilos after a health scare (those of us who’ve been following the Jolly LLB series carefully would know this reference) and is now dating a cute police inspector, Chanchal Chautala (Shilpa Shukla). In the scene, he calls her up while cameras are being fixed in his court for a live recording of his next proceeding, and informs her to watch him online. The scene is quirky, almost comedic.
There is no segue between the two scenes, no narrative thread connecting them that would make sense in the larger scheme of things. These scenes seem completely detached from one another, like they belong to two different films. This is the core issue in Jolly LLB 3: confused direction, overemphasis on the actors (who are all brilliant but can only take a weak story so far), and manipulative, almost complacent writing.
The story is as predictable as it comes. Jolly Mishra and Jolly Tyagi (Arshad Warsi) are now lawyers in Delhi, and often butt heads because of confusion with their nicknames. They even have a face-off in court as promised in the trailer, with Mishra taking the Goliath’s side (Khaitan group) and Tyagi fighting for Janki Solanki (aka the common farmer). The face-off is merely lip-service, though, a plot point that gets over before it even begins — when it should have been the highlight of the film. At some point, the Jollys come together to fight against the system and to represent the farmers.
Apart from the final courtroom scenes, nothing about Jolly LLB 3 is inspiring or worth watching. Some successful scenes are borrowed from the previous films, for example, the banter between Jolly Mishra and his wife, Pushpa (Huma Qureshi), but they don't quite land because there’s nothing new they offer. The core issue with a cash-grab sequel is that the film's intention is clearly visible to a keen audience member. It isn’t to tell an inspiring story here or even provide a razor-sharp courtroom drama that piques attention, but to ride on the wave of success that the first two films earned, by replicating the same scenes, the same writing and the same formulas as before. The end result? A jumbled screenplay and a needlessly long film with not much new to say.
To their credit, Akshay Kumar and Arshad Warsi have great chemistry, but their banter is dragged on for too long in the first half of the film. A travesty, because the previous two films were both charming in their own ways. They were also relevant and addressed issues that still merit emotional investment even in 2025, whether it is a drunk driving case in the first film or fake encounters and communal conflicts in the second film. Jolly LLB 3 seems dated and repetitive in comparison.
The casting in the Jolly LLB films has always been its strong suit, and the biggest winner in that regard is Saurabh Shukla, who plays his role with comedic perfection, even in the third film, to a point where all other subplots in Jolly LLB 3 don’t work as well as Shukla’s does. With actors like Seema Biswas, Gajraj Singh (playing Hari Lal Khaitan, the head of the evil Khaitan group), Ram Kapoor (hot-shot defence lawyer) and many others, the metaphorical table had been set. A legacy movie series, a tight courtroom setting, and great actors at your disposal. But with a weak script and haphazard direction, even the best-laid plans can go haywire. One last resort solution could have been a tighter edit, but even on that front, Jolly LLB 3 fails, as the film runs way too long and risks an attention dip from the viewer.
Perhaps one of the most prickly things about Jolly LLB 3 is that Arshad Warsi is missing in the first half of the climax, where Akshay Kumar proudly takes centrestage to deliver what should have been an impactful legal monologue (and we know he’s capable of it because he delivered one in Jolly LLB 2), but falls short of being one. This is because the climax is constructed to be more emotionally manipulative than impactful, and there’s no greater proof of this than how the makers choose to end the climax: a 90-second scene of Seema Biswas sobbing (and a close shot, that too). Followed by a scene where a goat is paraded in the courtroom, as further proof of how the film stands with the common man.
It’s a pity that Jolly LLB 3 is ultimately a lazy, formulaic film because its predecessors were impressively crafted and had a unique storytelling voice. It only proves that not all cash-grab sequels work.