Housefull is back – a fifth time! It’s been six years since Housefull 4 (the longest we’ve gone without a Housefull dose). Returning for the fifth time are also Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh and Chunky Panday (as Aakhri Pasta – a role so iconic now that he was in one of the ads in the interval).
Other returning cast members include Abhishek Bachchan, Nargis Fakhri, Jacqueline Fernandez, Shreyas Talpade and Johnny Lever. And this time we get two reported endings – billed in screenings and on the censor certificate as Housefull 5A and Housefull 5B (this is the first time a Hindi film has attempted to do this.) I have only suffered through one of these (5A).
Unsubtle Humour
Every Housefull film attempts to get more outlandish than the last – 4 was a reincarnation comedy, of all things – and the new one, directed by Tarun Mansukhani, sets itself up as a murder mystery on a cruise ship. A patriarch named Ranjeet Dobriyal (Ranjeet), apparently 100 years old although no attempt has been made to make this look true, dies on this cruise. He leaves behind a high-tech will, which consists of a hologram of himself striding around the room and addressing each person in turn. It is as ridiculous as it sounds.
In this ‘will’, he declares that he will leave all his wealth not to his second son Dev (a very natty Fardeen Khan), but to his first son, Jolly. Nobody has met Jolly (which is conveniently never explained), so Dev is tasked with identifying him from three passengers claiming to be Jolly. These are Julius (Kumar), Jalbhushan (Bachchan) and Jalabuddin (Deshmukh). But before you can privately think Amar Akbar Anthony, a character has already made the joke.
This is what Housefull 5, co-written by Mansukhani, Sajid Nadiadwala and Farhad Samji, is really about: humour wrung from the lowest-hanging fruit, shoved in our faces without a smidgeon of subtlety.
Among the more shocking choices are two instances of animal cruelty played for laughs: a talking parrot is beaten and pummelled by all three leading men, and Julius gets into fisticuffs with a couple of monkeys. Both of these are supposedly throwbacks to the previous instalments, but they just leave a bad taste in the mouth.
And when no other jokes work, the film leans on meta references. There is a mild pleasure in hearing Jackie Shroff (playing an inept police officer) say, ‘Chhoti bachchi hai kya?’, but none in the fact that we’re expected to laugh at Sanjay Dutt (playing another officer) being called Khalnayak, the title of the hit 1994 film in which he was on the other side of the law.
Divide Between Stars and Character Actors
But the crime worse than stale humour, is the sheer number of actors stuffed into this movie with precious little to do.
Talpade, for instance, played one of the leading men in Housefull 2 but is now reduced to the thankless role of some sort of grey-haired secretary. No such bad luck for Kumar, pushing sixty and still at the helm.
That tells you everything you need to know about the divide between stars and character actors.
Sonam Bajwa, as Jalabuddin’s begum, gets one good scene where she switches from measured Urdu (Julius calls her ‘Ghalib ka thoonka hua paan’) to manic Punjabi, but poor Fernandez and Fakhri don’t even get that much.
Indeed, Fakhri’s character is introduced with a Nepali accent, which disappears after a couple scenes. Then we have Chitrangda Singh, looking beautiful – and bored. Soundarya Sharma is supposedly playing the family lawyer Lucy, but all she is made to do is wear plunging necklines and tiny skirts, much to the slavering delight of the men around her.
The skin show is equal-opportunity, though: Dino Morea is also here – and we get to watch him groove in an unbuttoned shirt (talk about slavering!).
The grooving takes place in ‘Qayamat’, one of several passably tuneful numbers from White Noise Collectives, Yo Yo Honey Singh and Tanishk Bagchi (amongst others) that act as gleaming speed-breakers in an already overlong film.
A Killer Is on the Loose — Sadly, It’s the Script
But remember that this is a murder mystery. At least initially, we are meant to appreciate this lofty goal. The film opens most grimly with a grisly knifing (the 5 of the title appears as a bloody handprint) – a sequence that includes a door-hacking scene straight out of The Shining. Not to worry, though, because very soon we are back in Housefull territory: the murders (of course there will be more) are treated to long stretches of unfunny comedy.
Ranjeet’s corpse – the most alive-looking dead body you have seen, not a blemish or a slack jaw in sight – is at one point paraded through the ship in a series of interactions where nobody realises he’s dead.
This was hilarious in the deadpan and sardonic environment of a Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro; in the broad and slapstick world of a Housefull, it’s just tiresome.
Tiresome is a good way to describe Housefull 5 because it blares on for nearly three hours, with perhaps one genuine laugh every hour. Amidst the pubic hair jokes and tota-and-popat innuendoes, the hunt for the killer continues.
Hours later, the head of Interpol also shows up, a man named Dagdu, who is played by Nana Patekar in a weird godman get-up. He even leads everyone in a ludicrous phugdi dance performance. Why? It’s anyone’s guess.
By the time we get to the interminable climax and the killer reveal, you may be ready to reveal yourself as a killer and enact mass execution on the people onscreen. Or at least on this franchise.
(Sahir Avik D'souza is a writer based in Mumbai. His work has been published by Film Companion, TimeOut, The Indian Express and EPW. He is an editorial assistant at Marg magazine.)