Akshay Kumar’s voice during the opening disclaimer, that the film is not based on any actual incident, is in total contrast to the 2013 Jolly LL.B. which portrayed the celebrated hit-and-run case in Delhi.

The sequel, clearly devised to bank on Akshay’s star-power, has protagonist Jagdishwar Mishra aka Jolly (Akshay) as the 15^th legal assistant of a high profile lawyer of Lucknow masquerading as a thriving lawyer himself. In the process he inadvertently dupes a widow Hina Siddiqui (Sayani Gupta) causing her to end her life.

The streetsmart Jolly, who was earlier not averse to making a quick buck – the means be damned – now resorts to seek justice; taking on in the process his nemesis, a legal luminary Sachin Mathur (Annu Kapoor) with a flourishing business. That, in a nutshell, is the premise of Jolly-2.

Director Subhash Kapoor brings to the sequel fragments of the 2013 runaway sleeper hit with just the right dose of social message and courtroom drama. In exactly a half year, the decorous and restrained Rustom has transformed into the demonstrative and rowdy Jolly. More of an entertainer than the earlier one, the sequel does have some fun moments, such as the Judge Tripathy (a brilliant performance by Saurabh Shukla), with his quirky idiosyncrasies and a penchant for alluding to Bollywood personalities, crossing out the typos (Sujata wets Dev) in his daughter’s wedding invitation card during courtroom proceedings. With a carrot–and–stick policy towards the wayward defense lawyer Mathur, Saurabh Shukla slips into the role of the judge, vexed and harried by the two confronting lawyers, with effortless ease. He is to the Jolly franchise what Arshad Warsi is to the Munnabhai films – the mainstay of the films around which the counsels parry.

Kumud Mishra as the errant cop Suryaveer Singh, the encounter specialist, excels with his expressions, while Huma Qureshi as Jolly’s Gucci-loving, whisky-swigging wife Pushpa has nothing much to do.

Dialogues and scenes such as Manish Malhotra’s lehengas, are trivial and hamper the pace of the film. But there are ample scenes with a telling commentary from the Kashmir political situation.