The funniest joke so far is that someone actually sued the makers of Housefull 3 alleging that they stole his script. It’s a frivolous claim, dear friends, as a coherent plotline is conspicuous by its absence throughout the whole 132 minutes runtime.
“When you can’t impress them with your content, dazzle them with your bullshit” seems to be the one line brief that directors Sajid-Farhad stubbornly follow. Carcasses of stale WhatsApp jokes can be found strewn all along as we shift uneasily in our chairs… waiting for at least one good laugh!
Boman Irani plays a Gujju dad who mouths PJs like “ Aadmi ko seedha hona chahiye kyunki ulta to Tarak Mehta ka chashma bhi hai.” His three daughters – Ganga, Jamna and Saraswati played by Jacqueline Fernandez, Lisa Haydon and Nargis Fakhri – are pretty, “dumb”bells who, apart from looking smokin’ hot, add precious little to our viewing pleasure. Akshay Kumar, Abhishek Bachchan and Reitesh Deshmukh try hard, a little too hard but to no avail.
However, Housefull 3 makes us laugh. Pre-interval we are laughing “at” the actors on screen. It is, after all, rib-tickling to see a Nargis Fakhri trying to emote, or witness an Abhishek Bachchan clicking a selfie with the wax statue of his own dad and then singing “Abhi – shake shake, abhi-shake shake!” (Yes! I’m not making this up!) Post interval, we laugh at our own miserable selves, wondering what made us book tickets for something that looked dubious from the trailer itself! Things finally begin to look up when Jackie Shroff makes an appearance, but by then it’s too little too late.
Housefull 3 was touted as a “masala” film for the masses. Slapstick humour isn’t the problem here, but the trouble is that all the tediously-put buffoonery cant give us anything that we truly treasure. I’ll give it a generous 1.5 QUINTS OUT OF 5. Go for it if you must, knowing it is injurious to your health!
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