Five Times Zero:
The first Housefull movie came out in 2010; since then the boys have grown to 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 sexual fantasies. This comedy franchise is supposedly one of the most successful, but only the most dedicated fan would remember what went into the last four movies, except that Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Chunky ‘Aakhri Pasta’ Panday and Johny ‘Batuk Patel’ Lever are regulars. The villains and romantic interests are interchangeable.
The fifth film in the series begins with a murder, and the ‘5’ appears as a bloody palm print. As a whodunit (with horror movie background score), this one uses the Knives Out or cozy mystery template, sprinkled with crude humour, and the kind of who-cares attitude by which dozens of people land up for the dance numbers, and then vanish from the luxury cruise ship where the film is set.
The ship is called Aiee, which is that lechy sound associated with Ranjit’s villainy. He plays a 100-year-old man who dies, leaving his fortune to his son from the first wife—a mysterious Jolly—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—but actually just increase the list of suspects, Nikitin Dheer is the ship’s captain, Soundarya Sharma 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 much of a crowd is not enough—three Jollys turn up with their fake spouses – Julius (Akshay Kumar), Jalabuddin (Riteish Deshmukh), Jalbhushan (Abhishek Bachchan), with the scantily dressed Jacqueline Fernandez, Sonam Bajwa and Nargis Fakhri.
Dev orders a DNA test, but the doctor (Akashdeep Sabir) is murdered and the samples destroyed. When another dead body is discovered, the cops are summoned and who should land up but the clownish Bhidu and Baba (Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff), who have been suspended from the London police force; (the Dutt character is accompanied by the Khalnayak title music). And to complete the kumbh mela crowd of casting, Nana Patekar lands up in rustic costume, but he is actually Dagdu, the cops’ boss.
The plot is too thin for a 165-minute film, so there are gags like a fight in the kitchen with a garrulous parakeet Gucci, offspring of Versace from an earlier film, killed by a vacuum cleaner. When the animal rights folk were looking away, Julius also gets into a slapping match with two monkeys.
While they are running about the ship trying to figure out who the killer might be, the three Jollys get to do the old gag about holding up a corpse and trying to pass it off as a living being. When the humour, such as it is, starts to look threadbare, grand song-and-dance sequences are added (the music is catchy). There is the line-up everybody and let ‘em fly kind of climax that Priyadarshan used to be so fond of in his comedy days. There is a gimmick used by which different cinemas will have a different killer, which, the way things pan out is not so difficult to manage. A guest star as the real Jolly drops by to wrap up the mayhem.
Housefull 5—written by producer Sajid Nadiadwala—is very slightly less idiotic and vulgar than the earlier films in the series, for which Sajid Khan was responsible. And some of the funny sequences do land. Of the lot, Riteish Deshmukh is the one with genuine comic flair—he gets a running gag in which he talks of two things at the same time, confusing the listener. Akshay Kumar used to do this kind of thing with ease, but now the strain is showing– he has to parade in his briefs for a long time, with a dinosaur tail attached, to prove he can still carry off this sort of silliness. The formula is also wearing thin, but it looks like the franchise is not giving up any time soon.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)