Housefull 5, for which producer Sajid Nadiadwala has taken writing credits (boo and hiss to that), is not only brainless, witless, charmless, brakeless, worthless—go ahead, add your own invectives to the hate list—it is also an extremely vulgar film.
This I find very surprising. The camera behaves like the lascivious Ranjeet (who, by the way, has a role to play as a corpse, though not as convincing a corpse as Satish Shah in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron). The camera peers leeringly down the actresses’ thighs and cleavages.
I remember producer Sajid Nadiadwala once telling me he doesn’t allow cleavages in his films as he finds them vulgar. Evidently, that is no more so. Or maybe he still finds them vulgar, but desperate times call for desperate remedies.
Housefull (a chap sitting behind us, far funnier than anything on screen, called it Blousefull) is an insanely desperate funny film that is not funny… unless you think a parrot being sucked into a vacuum cleaner is funny, or Nargis Fakhri (yes, she is still around!) doing a Nepali accent (or what she thinks to be a Nepali accent) is funny… or Abhishek Bachchan being repeatedly hit on his groin (how could you, Abhishek) until he passes out, is funny.
As for Akshay Kumar, his career hits rock bottom (I know, we’ve been saying that through so many of his recent starrers) with this seriously misfired comedy which finds him, for the first time, aiming for the crotch. There is an abundance of testicular jokes carpeting the, ha ha, comedy, wail to wail.
Abhishek, by the way, suffers from a sleeping disorder. His character, named Jolly (all three protagonists are Jolly), dozes off anywhere, anytime. I too found myself nodding off intermittently during the 2 hours 42 minutes of unbearable playing time. You see, the jokes are not really jokes. They are a barely camouflaged means of testing the audience’s patience.
By the time we reached the climax, which has Nana Patekar (playing an Interpol chief in a dhoti-kurta ensemble) dancing the Dandiya with his two subordinates Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt loitering around to the sound of the Khalnaayak theme song, I figured out the real reason why Nadiadwala’s execrable garbage (directed for the record by Tarun Mansukhani, who once directed Dostana for Karan Johar) was made: it was to remind us that the end of ‘Bollywood’ as we know (and once loved) is near. How many more such catastrophic abominations can the film industry survive? How long before the audience’s patience gives way?
Akshay Kumar, who had just retrieved some dignity with Kesari 2, squanders away his advantage with a performance so ill-aimed, his misfired comic timing is a bigger joke than anything he does in the film. One of his chuckle fits involves Nana Patekar’s dhoti flying about with Akshay jumping and screaming, “Dekh liya.”
This calls for a two-minute silence. The rest of the cast is lamentably hammy, each outdoing the other with whirls of wiz-dumb, insulting all and sundry including a poorly aimed joke at Malaika Arora.
Apologize to the audience for pulling this gag. This is not a movie. It is a joke. And an unfunny one. As for the killer’s identity, it doesn’t really matter, as the actual murder victim is good taste. The entire cast and crew of Housefull 5 are housed on a luxury ship that gives us ‘see’ sickness.
