Housefull 5 review: A desperate attempt to keep the boys’ locker room comedy alive!

Packaged as a "family entertainer", Housefull 5 offers crass comedy for kids and is a masterclass in how to objectify women every way till Sunday.

There are films you watch just to unwind, brain rot included, and then there are films that are creatively and morally bankrupt, like Housefull 5. A film so committed to absurdity, it opens with a murder aboard a luxury cruise (aieee) not of the sleazy UK billionaire Ranjeet, who dies anyway at his 100th birthday party, but of his doctor, who falls dramatically through a glass ceiling. Who killed him is the question that starts to unravel the mystery; with Ranjeet gone, his board members, Bedi (Dino Morea), Shiraz (Shreyas Talpade), Maya (Chitrangada Singh), and his son Dev (Fardeen Khan), begin eyeing the £69-billion inheritance. But their hopes are crushed when Ranjeet’s hologram declares that everything will go to his secret child, Jolly. And that's when the three Jolly's are introduced - Julius (Akshay Kumar), Jalabuddin (Riteish Deshmukh), and Jalbhushan (Abhishek Bachchan), each one with an arm candy aka a “foreign” wife (Jacqueline Fernandez, Nargis Fakhri, and Sonam Bajwa), who aren't characters, they're identical props - interchangeable and indistinguishable. 

Also Read: Housefull 5 box office report: Akshay Kumar starrer records impressive opening weekend collections

This couldn’t be a more straightforward plot for a murder mystery that's unnecessarily complicated. Everyone has a motive and the killer is clearly one of them but instead of building suspense or actual intrigue, the film meanders through a series of overstretched and low-effort gags. Slowly it starts to become less of a whodunit and more of a why-have-you-done-this-to-us. Having said that, as far as franchises go, Housefull has never been about thematic depth, it’s always been more about piecing together whatever was trending in the West and remixing it into a masala mess. Hence, it's not strange that this time, they’ve gone for a Knives Out spoof. But what could’ve been an opportunity to create an “eat the rich” parody becomes a desperate sequence of outdated punches, ones that just don't work anymore.

Every woman in Housefull 5 is reduced to walking punchlines. The film barely bothers to register them, let alone give them anything resembling a personality. They’re just there to fawn over or follow the men around, pose or dance seductively, and occasionally give an idea on cue. Lucy (Soundarya Sharma), a lawyer, is there solely to serve as the butt of all jokes, quite literally while Jacqueline, Nargis, Sonam, and Chitrangada are paraded through sequences that focus more on their bodies than anything they’re doing. Even when they’re supposed to be pulling off a heist, the camera ogles at them while the script giggles. And once the film runs out of ways to look at them solely from the male gaze, it turns to cheap nonsense like cracking a sexual joke or taking a dig at queer people.

In this comedy of errors, humour doesn’t arise out of situations; it’s forced in, desperately. Riteish Deshmukh rambles in circles, confusing only himself, Abhishek Bachchan randomly falls asleep standing up in serious moments and Akshay Kumar, the loyal face of the franchise, fights birds and monkeys in scenes that feel like uninspired leftovers from earlier films. Jackie Shroff as Baba and Sanjay Dutt as Biddu show up as desi caricatures of police but contribute a little more than being screen fillers, making the film feel crowded rather than entertaining. The film’s timing is so off that even the dialogue looks badly dubbed. This murder mystery is so lazily constructed that the stacking of dead bodies is used as a recurring visual gag. When Nana Patekar joins in later as a Marathi version of the Benoit Blanc style detective connecting dots that barely exist, it makes it officially clear that suspense is non-existent here. 

The questions that lingered for me much after the credits rolled were - Will male actors ever be held accountable for choosing to do such films, only to later speak on panels about women empowerment and equality? Also, why was the rest of the theatre laughing? Has the meaning of comedy changed and did I miss the memo? Am I expecting too much by asking for comedy that’s sharp, layered, maybe the kind a stand-up can deliver with precision? Or, in this political climate, are movies like Housefull 5 the only safe choice? I'll leave that for you to ponder on as well.

Housefull 5 is currently running in theatres near you!

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