The first Housefull movie came out in 2010. Since then, the boys have grown into men but the antics remain juvenile. No cleavage passes without being peered down, no crotch survives an accidental bash. Homophobic gags are randomly added. The women are deliberately dressed in skimpy outfits to fit into schoolboy fantasies.
This comedy franchise is supposedly one of the most successful, but only the most dedicated fan will remember what went into the last four movies, except that Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Chunky “Aakhri Pasta” Panday and Johny “Bakul Patel” Lever are regulars. The villains and lovers are interchangeable.
Directed by Tarun Mansukhani and written by producer Sajid Nadiadwala, Housefull 5 begins with a murder. As a whodunit, this one uses the Knives Out/cozy mystery template sprinkled with crude humour and the kind of who-cares attitude by which dozens of people land up for dance numbers and then vanish from the luxury cruise ship where the story is set.
The ship is called Aiee, that lechy sound associated with Ranjit’s villainy. He plays a 100-year-old man who dies, leaving his fortune to his son from his first wife, while Dev (Fardeen Khan), the son from his second wife, quietly fumes.
Shreyas Talpade, Chitrangda Singh and Dino Morea play the company’s board members – just to increase the list of suspects. Nikitin Dheer is the ship’s captain, Soundarya is the lawyer (who is made to drop papers to flash her cleavage), Chunky Panday is the cook and Johny Lever the security man. This crowd not being enough, three Jollys turn up with their fake spouses – Julius (Akshay Kumar), Jalabuddin (Riteish Deshmukh) and Jalbhushan (Abhishek Bachchan), along with Jacqueline Fernandez, Sonam Bajwa and Nargis Fakhri.
When another dead body is discovered, the cops are summoned. Who should land up but Bhidu and Baba (Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff), who have been suspended from the London police force. To complete the kumbh mela casting, Nana Patekar turns up in rustic costume.
The film has two different endings, but how things pan out is not so difficult to manage. The plot is too thin for a 165-minute film, so there are gags such as a fight in the kitchen with a garrulous parakeet (the offspring of Versace from the earlier film).
Julius gets into a slapping match with two monkeys. The three Jollys get to do the old gag of holding up a corpse and passing it off as a living being.
When the humour, such as it is, starts to look threadbare, song-and-dance sequences are added (the music is catchy). There is the ‘line-up everybody and the let ‘em fly’ climax that Priyadarshan is so fond of.
Housefull 5 is slightly less idiotic and vulgar than the earlier films by Sajid Khan. Some of the funny sequences do land.
Riteish Deshmukh, the one with genuine comic flair, gets a running gag in which he talks about two things at the same time. Akshay Kumar used to do this kind of thing with ease, but the strain is now showing. The formula is wearing thin too, but it looks like the franchise is not giving up any time soon.
