Housefull 5 is the most idiotic thing I've watched this year, asserts Sukanya Verma.
Ask me the plot of the last four Housefull movies and all I can recall are crowded frames filled with cringey, racist humour glorifying dumb blokes, dim-witted women, scowling fathers, random animals and rampant innuendoes designed to appease the lowest common denominator in the audience.
Like or loathe, the shtick is raking in the moolah and now there's a fifth film in the franchise keeping up its tradition of revelling in stupidity and birdbrain imagination.
Only Housefull 5 is so rubbish, you'd think none of the actors, 17 or so of them, have any inkling as to where the script is heading and take the extempore challenge too far.
Out of ideas for a while now and resorting to gimmicks like two endings -- luring viewers into double viewings and ordeal -- this Tarun Mansukhani directed fool fest, is the most idiotic thing I've watched this year so far.
Set around a cruise ship called Aiee, as an in-joke alluding to its owner Ranjeet and his lustfully muttered catchword, Housefull 5 begins like a slasher movie with a masked man stabbing an allergy-plagued doctor on board.
Cut to a dead Ranjeet's hologram announcing his will and the inheritor of all his billion dollar wealth -- much to the dismay of his shady-looking board of directors (Chitrangada Singh, Shreyas Talpade, Dino Morea and Fardeen Khan) that includes a son from his second wife.
An Amar Akbar Anthony trio of Jollys pop up out of thin air -- Akshay Kumar, Abhishek Bachchan, Riteish Deshmukh -- claiming their right to the fortune with a respective spouse in tow hailing from Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan (Jacqueline Fernandez, Nargis Fakhri, Sonam Bajwa) for reasons best known to its makers.
Half an hour is squandered in introducing this cacophonous gathering, two seconds in forgetting a man has died, another murdered, to break into one raucous group song after another, so identical that nothing changes except the colour of the sequins in the costumes.
Where the rest of the crew and guests disappear after these song and dance sessions, don't ask. They're like a living embodiment of 'now you see me now you don't'.
The movie treats logic like a disease and avoids it at all costs.
There's no how or why to a single appearance or occurrence, it's just there. Problem is how unamusing this randomness is.
Like when Sanjay Dutt and Jackie Shroff show up as Bhiddu and Baba with Khalnayak's signature tune playing in the background, we are expected to be rolling in the aisles because they swapped names? Yawn is more like it.
There's Nana Patekar too, doing a London supercop carrying a Marathi manoos hangover with such baffled eyes, it's like he was woken up from deep slumber to deliver a shot.
Between its casual racism, sexism, cat fights, blown-up birds avenging their dads from previous prequels and never-ending d%^& jokes that includes pubic hair gags and suffering the usually reliable Johnny Lever in near buff, Housefull 5's semi-sex comedy in a whodunit's body passes off cringe for comic.
There is a flock of actors rambling around yet not a single performance resisting the urge to be a loud caricature.
The girls have it worst amidst its passing-the-parcel of partners scenario and scene after scene of their skimpily-clad beings giving the camera's male gaze abundant reason to fixate on their curves and skin show.
A ex-Housefull alumnus shows up at the fag end of its Priyadarshan-style chaos filled climax stating I don't care. Neither do I about this headache named Housefoosss.
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