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‘Housefull 5’ Movie Review: Blink Twice If You Are In Danger
Not even Akshay Kumar’s comic timing and a twin-ending gimmick can rescue 'Housefull 5' from itself.
Director: Tarun Mansukhani
Writers: Tarun Mansukhani, Farhad Samji, Sajid Nadiadwala
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan, Chitrangada Singh, Jacqueline Fernandez, Sonam Bajwa, Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Soundarya Sharma, Nana Patekar, Fardeen Khan, Dino Morea, Shreyas Talpade, Ranjeet
Language: Hindi
I’ve chuckled a grand total of two times across five instalments of the Housefull franchise. It says something that, in both instances, the gag involved an animal (not the film). No humans were harmed in the making. The snoring crocodile from Housefull 2 (2012) broke through my defences. I have a fondness for crocodiles (on screen), so to hear one snore in his post-lunch sleep was a dream come true I never knew I needed. In Housefull 5, it’s a parrot named Gucci that attacks a man who killed said parrot’s dad in one of the previous films — all of this scored to the Om Shanti Om soundtrack, lest we assume that only human characters are allowed to have reincarnation revenge tracks. Two men team up to bodyslam Gucci and pin him down to the count of three like a wrestler. I might have also grinned when Akshay Kumar smashes his fingers and Jackie Shroff gives him a guitar to make music out of those quivering fingers. It’s an inspired piece of inanity in a Bollywood franchise that feasts on the lowest hanging fruits.
Before this review turns into a confession about growing up on 1990s David Dhawan comedies, I’m going to just say that Housefull 5 is 165 minutes long. The first half alone feels longer than a 3-hour-long Tom Cruise blockbuster. It’s a crowded, crass, cursed and chaotic cruise-ship comedy that also pretends to be a murder mystery. The killer wears a mask, there are countless suspects and infinite jokes that don’t land, and there are twists that unfold like an excuse for the crew to crack up off-camera. But most of all, there’s this. In a gimmick that gives Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) an identity crisis and commercial Indian storytelling a whole new way to make money, Housefull 5 not only has two endings, it’s basically one film for the price of two. Which is to say that there are two versions, each with a different climax and killer that isn’t hard to guess if you notice which character is missing from the finale of the version you see.
Viewers with time on their hands might finish one and use their second ticket to watch the last 30 minutes of the other one. But true bravehearts might finish one and sit down to watch the full show of the next because tickets are not cheap. And six hours is par for the course in a moviegoing experience where the screening itself is often secondary to the ads and trailers. I watched Housefull 5a — a title that rightly signifies the schoolboy-coded, fifth-grade-level humour — and came away with a headache the size of the frown on the faces of multiplex employees in charge of maintaining sanity and security in screens this weekend. I’m not sure Housefull 5b, or c or f or z for that matter, is a huge improvement.
If you think it’s a miracle I haven’t written a word about the film yet, imagine the miracle of a film that makes it impossible to distinguish a joke from a punchline from a song from a cameo from the nostalgic technique of using the lecherous male gaze as a running gag. No female body part is spared. Nobody is safe. The film opens with a murder of a doctor on a luxury cruise. The occasion is a sleazy UK billionaire’s (Ranjeet, of course) 100th birthday party. Except he pops it in the morning, which leaves his board of directors — Bedi (Dino Morea), Shiraz (Shreyas Talpade), Maya (Chitrangada Singh) and Ranjeet’s super-pensive son Dev (Fardeen Khan) — with the hope of inheriting his 69-billion-pound (insert dated innuendo) company. But Ranjeet instead leaves his property to a mystery second son named Jolly.
On cue, three Jolly’s show up to claim the fortune: Julius (Akshay Kumar), Jalabuddin (Ritiesh Deshmukh) and Jalbhushan (Abhishek Bachchan). Each of them has a ‘foreign’ spouse (Jacqueline Fernandez, Nargis Fakhri, Sonam Bajwa), but the women insist on being interchangeable because they’re all crooks looking to make a not-so-quick and agonisingly stretched buck. There’s also a skimpily dressed lawyer named Lucy (Soundarya Sharma), who becomes the source of at least four cleavage, butt and leg gags. Towards the end, Jolly 1 keeps brandishing a gun because whenever he does, she instinctively raises her hands and her skirt rides up while the men — especially poor Talpade’s character — drool at her garter stockings like cartoon wolves posing as live-action fools. Two London cops, over-played by Khalnayak duo Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt, join the mess before their boss (Nana Patekar) randomly shows up as a Maharashtrian Sherlock. The questions remain: where are the other guests on this massive cruise? Is Dil Dhadakne Do a joke? Why does an actual ship look like a fake one?
The previous paragraph felt surreal to write, but it’s nothing new in an era where mainstream entertainment has long lost its goofy sheen. Also, before I forget, the ship is named “Aieee” in tribute to veteran Ranjeet’s trademark ‘sound’. Now that the anti-plot (pronounced ‘Antichrist’) has been described, it’s easy to treat Housefull 5 as a ridiculous, willfully silly and so-bad-it’s-good throwback to the multi-starring gagfests (make of this term what you will) of the mid-2000s. Given the current landscape — where it’s often hard to tell horror from comedy and vice versa — maybe a lewd, tone-deaf and slapstick marauder is the need of the hour. Maybe Akshay Kumar’s comic timing is the comeback we deserve. Maybe I’m being uptight about its crudity and casual sexism. Maybe the scene of the men mistakenly pulling out the pubic hair of a corpse wrapped up in a carpet is funny. Maybe the non-existent lip-sync and awry (pronounced ‘Orry’) dubbing is an audacious new language. Maybe the picture of a muscular rat who was fed vitamins instead of rat poison atones for other sins. No?
No. Even within a Welcome-coded genre, this is bottom-tier stuff. Housefull 5 is the movie manifestation of that offensive old uncle who keeps gatecrashing annual functions, shames youngsters for being too modern and urges everyone to stop being so woke — he also asks a different relative for a loan before he leaves. Such family adult-comedies are designed to trivialise all the cultural flaws and gender digs that its dramatic counterparts (Arjun Reddy, Animal and the likes) are accused of glorifying. They’re two sides of the same shiny coin. The Housefull franchise hides behind its ability to pull off harmless jokes — like the random shot of Johnny Lever’s Gujarati character stripping down in a sauna only to realise it’s a smoke-filled kitchen — that feeds the cringey children in us. It’s amusing for a second, and it softens the average post-MeToo viewer for the tasteless ingredients: like one woman putting on a dodgy Nepali accent, another speaking in chaste Urdu only to be called “Ghalib ke thookey huey paan (the paan that Ghalib spits),” and another offering to sleep with a man every time her life is in danger.
Call me old-fashioned, but it’s hard to shake off the creepiness of watching a movie as counter-flippant as Housefull 5(a) in 2025. Now the title looks like a clause in a contract, which is ironic, because the film often feels like a presentation of double entendres that gaslit me into believing that I’ve missed this sort of nonsense. I probably haven’t. Being in hell doesn’t imply that the good old days of stale plants were better. To get to the colourful Hollywood-borrowed moments, one must first encounter the hologram of Ranjeet wet-kissing a photograph of Archana Puran Singh. But I’m willing to buy one (1) ticket to a 6th installment that features only the shortchanged animals. The born-again parrot could be the killer in one climax, the nap-loving crocodile in the other. Either way, the victim is the audience member determined to let out a full-throated laugh after a difficult week.