The Housefull franchise has never been a favorite of mine, but the money it makes from the box office has given its producer, Sajid Nadiadwala, the confidence to make a fifth one, and this time, he has taken the effort to write the story and screenplay himself. Well, when you watch the movie, it does become obvious that you don’t need much brain to write something like this. I don’t vividly remember any of the other films in this franchise. But none of them were as sleazy as this one. The women in this movie are placed only to be ogled, and men staring at and describing their bodies is half the humor in this whole movie, which has only jokes and a wafer-thin story.
So, the story here revolves around the 100th birthday celebration of billionaire Ranjeet Dobriyal happening on a cruise ship. Unfortunately, on the evening of his birthday, he passes away, and the people on his company’s board find out that Ranjeet has a son named Jolly, who is supposed to reach there to join the birthday party. Instead of one Jolly, three arrive on the ship, and subsequently, a murder happens on the ship. What we see here is the quest to find the real Jolly and also the murderer.
In a chat show in the past, Riteish Deshmukh famously said that if you ask an auto rickshaw guy about his opinion on Great Grand Masti, he would give 50 stars to the movie. Somewhere, I feel movies like the ones happening in the Masti franchise or even the Housefull franchise are created to satisfy a particular category of the audience, and if that means satisfying men who enjoy catcalling women, makers in Bollywood won’t hesitate. Then, they would obviously bring up the fact of how we embrace sex comedies made in the West. There are bad sex comedies in the West as well. But the good ones have a proper chain of events that make you laugh, listening to the smartness of the way they plant certain jokes. In Housefull 5, you are supposed to laugh five times for the same joke.
Directed by Tarun Mansukhani, Housefull 5 comes with this strategy of having multiple endings, and I saw Housefull 5A. This is actually a clever strategy to create some noise. Imagine if this was a whodunit thriller directed by someone like Vishal Bhardwaj, and the makers said that this movie would have multiple endings. There will be definitely some outrage in these days of expensive movie tickets. But the reputation of the Housefull franchise is such that people are absolutely calm about it, and it is like an unwritten understanding that nobody is going to watch a Housefull film to appreciate the story. And frankly, my disappointment in Housefull 5 was not because it had a bad ending or the twist was too simple. Housefull 5 is an extended skit you see on the Filmfare award nights, and it actually has half of Bollywood in it.
Akshay Kumar and Riteish Deshmukh are the veterans of the franchise, and they are pretty much repeating themselves, which is like a cakewalk thing for both of them. Abhishek Bachchan returns to the franchise after Housefull 3, and in the least agile way, he performed his version of Jolly. The three leading ladies, played by Nargis Fakhri, Jacqueline Fernandez, and Sonam Bajwa, are here only to show the audience what their diet plans and gym training have given them. There is a sequence where the three women are going through a ventilation duct, and the body scanner-like placement of the camera pretty much gives you the movie’s idea of entertainment. Soundarya Sharma, as lawyer Lucy, is also there to show off her body, and the way they focus on their bosoms and thighs to create humor clearly shows the talent drain Bollywood is facing right now.
The quintessential Housefull people, Chunky Pandey and Johnny Lever are reprising their roles in this one as well. Fardeen Khan, Shreyas Talpade, Chitangada Singh, and Dino Morea, people whom we don’t really see these days, play the parts of the suspects in the tale. Sanjay Dutt and Jacky Shroff are playing these dumb cops with the names Bhedu and Baba, respectively. We have Nana Patekar playing their head, wearing a dhoti and sneakers, and he is even dancing with the whole cast at one point.
In a way, I would say the Housefull franchise was ahead of its time because most of us weren’t ready for that kind of brain rot back in the day. But now that the short format free content has trained us to tolerate crap, Sajid Nadiadwala gets the confidence to come up with another version set in an expensive setup, and he even has the audacity to make two versions of it. With songs featuring the whole cast happening almost every 15 or 20 minutes (at least it felt like that), this is basically a lame award night show where you have songs and comedy skits happening one after the other.
