Housefull 5 Movie Review: Akshay Kumar's Film Is Utterly Absurd

There is no gain saying that a line separates the purely absurdist from the utterly absurd and it is anything but thin. But the makers of this thriller-comedy, the fifth instalment of the Housefull franchise, do not have the foggiest clue that fatuously fluffy isn't the same as freakily funny, and that daft isn't the same as droll. The film is much more of the former than the latter.   

Housefull 5, written by producer Sajid Nadiadwala and co-scripted and directed by Tarun Mansukhani (known as much for the successful Dostana as the disastrous Drive), set on a luxury cruise ship, it runs into rough waters never to find a way out of the deep end.  

Relying on gags that often drag on for way too long, Housefull 5 dangles between the outright asinine and the abjectly over-the-top. Unsurprisingly, as always, the women assembled here – Jacqueliene Fernandez, Sonam Bajwa, Nargis Fakhri, Chitrangda Singh, and Soundarya Sharma – are playthings pulled out of the woodwork for the dance numbers and for sporadic and ineffectual shots at desultory humour.  

Housefull 5 opens with a gruesome murder committed by a masked killer on a cruise ship that has set sail to celebrate the 100th birthday of the UK's seventh richest business tycoon. More homicides follow but the identity of the masked killer remains a mystery until a pair of suspended British-Indian cops reach the ship to investigate the crimes and are followed by the Interpol chief, also an Indian, a beedi-smoking one at that.  

It is a free for all out here and the film loses no opportunity to snuff out any semblance of logic that might be trying to peep out of the cacophony and give the proceedings a veneer of genuine zaniness. Housefull 5 is madcap all right but its pull-no-punches and respect-no-limits humour works against its own well-being.   

If that suggests that at least a segment of the franchise's committed constituency will not have “a jolly good time” watching the antics of a bunch of imposters, intruders, and investigators on a liner that careens into unending chaos.  

Not one, not two, but three men claiming to be Jolly, the purported inheritor of the dead entrepreneur's fortune, and their “wives” surface and lay claim to the wealth that Ranjeet Dobriyal (Ranjeet) amassed and is waiting to be inherited by his rightful heir. 

Jalabuddin alias Jolly (Riteish Deshmukh) appears on the scene in the company of Zara (Sonam Bajwa), followed by Jalbhushan alias Jolly (Abhishek Bachchan) with Sasikala (Jacqueline Fernandez) in tow, and Julius alias Jolly (Akshay Kumar) with Kaanchi (Nargis Fakhri).  

The guests are welcomed with growing exasperation and confusion by members of Dobriyal's ragtag “board of directors”: Maya (Chitrangda Singh), Bedi (Dino Morea), Dev (Fardeen Khan), the magnate's son from his second wife, and Shiraz (Shreyas Talpade). 

As the murders multiply and the interlopers run riot, nobody is above suspicion. And as the rigmarole turns wilder and wackier, and sillier and nuttier, the film loses its way completely, giving the audience many an occasion to laugh at the sheer tomfoolery unfolding on the screen.   

But even as all the baloney balloons out of control and makes a mockery of moviemaking, it is not always difficult to see why the non-stop nonsense might just find enough takers not to ever go out of vogue.             

If what you see on the screen is not up your street, you could direct your attention to the frequent laboured references that Housefull 5 makes not only to the earlier films of the series that began 15 years ago but also to elements drawn from other contemporaneous lores created around Hindi movies and film star careers.   

Akshay Kumar's character encounters no end of trouble again with monkeys (as he did in the first Housefull) and a macaw (like in Housefull 4, a film that had little to recommend itself to a discerning audience and yet made a fair amount of money at the box office). 

Boman Irani is conspicuous by his absence in Housefull 5 but his Batuk Patel is very much in the mix, with Johny Lever stepping into his shoes in the guise of the cruise ship's loquacious and lax security officer. Nikitin Dheer dons the garb of the ship's burly captain and a nod is duly made to the actor's Chennai Express persona, Thangabali. 

Sanjay Dutt and Jackie Shroff play the mis-christened Bhiddu and Baba respectively. The crazy cops find their way to the ship to look for the killer on the prowl. An instrumental remix of Nayak nahin khalnayak hoon main number plays on the soundtrack every time Dutt is on the screen.  

At one point, someone replaces khalnayak with nalayak, which is exactly the word that springs to mind as one tries to process and tide over the film's crude and largely misdirected attempts to tickle our funny bones.        

And, finally, Nana Patekar, as the Interpol chief, is given all the headroom that he needs to embody his Marathi manoos moorings, with the persistent accompaniment of Fugdi fu blaring away as he appears and sets the cat among the pigeons.  

Having established his credentials as a man who knows too much and yet not enough, he goes on to teach the men and women on the cruise ship the moves that characterise the folk-dance form. Everybody joins in and seems to be having fun. But what about those that have paid to watch this spectacle of inanity?  

If only Housefull 5 wasn't so full of unalloyed bilge, it would not have come across as the kind of unbridled celebration of the ludicrous that it does. Let us make no bones: we did not sign up for this.           

Housefull 5 – this critic has watched only one of the two versions out in the multiplexes – is a defiantly flaky comedy that is undermined by hopelessly flaccid plotting.