Housefull 5, The End Of Bollywood As We Knew & Loved It 

Rating: *

 Housefull 5, for which  producer Sajid Nadiadwala  has taken writing credits(boo and hiss to that), is not only brainless, witless, charmless, brakeless  worthless—go ahead, add your own invectives to the hate list—it is  also an extremely vulgar film.

 This I find  very surprising. The camera  behaves  like the lascivious Ranjeet(who by the way, has a  role to play as  a corpse, though not  as  convincing a corpse as Satish Shah in Jaane  Bhi Do Yaaron). The  camera peers leeringly  down  the actresses thighs  and cleavages.

I remember producer Sajid Nadiadwala once telling me  he doesn’t allow cleavages in his  films as he finds them  vulgar. Evidently that is no more so.Or maybe he still finds them vulgar, but desperate  times call for desperate  remedies.

Housefull(a chap sitting behind us, far  funnier than  anything on screen,  called it  Blousefull) is an insanely  desperate  funny  film that is not funny… unless you think  a parrot being sucked into  a vacuum cleaner is  funny, or Nargis Fakhri(yes she is  still around!)  doing a  Nepali accent (or what she thinks to be a  Nepali accent) is funny…or Abhishek Bachchan  being  repeatedly hit on his groin(how could you, Abhishek) until he  passes out,  is funny.

As  for Akshay  Kumar, his career  hits rockbottom(I know,we’ve been  saying that  through so many of  his recent starrers) with this  seriously  misfired comedy which  finds him, for the first time, aiming for the crotch .There is  an abundance  of  testicular  jokes carpeting the , ha ha, comedy, wail to wail.

Abhishek , by the way, suffers from a sleeping disorder. His character, named Jolly(all three protagonists  are  Jolly)  dozes  off  anywhere anytime.  I too found  myself nodding off  intermittently  during  the  2  hours  42  minutes  of  unbearable playing time.You see, the  jokes are not  really jokes. They are  a barely camouflaged means of  testing the  audiences’ patience.

By the time we reached the climax, which has  Nana  Patekar (playing a interpol chief in a  dhoti-kurta ensemble  dancing the Dandiya  with his two subordinates  Jackie  Shroff  and Sanjay Dutt loitering   around to the sound of  the Khalnaayak theme song, I figured  out the real reason why  Nadiadwala’s execrable garbage  (directed for the record by Tarun Mansukhani who once  directed Dostana for Karan  Johar)  was  made: it was to remind us that the end of ‘Bollywood’ as we know (and once loved) is near. How  many more such catastrophic abominations  can the film industry survive? How  long before the  audiences’ patience  gives way?

Akshay  Kumar who had just retrieved some  dignity with Kesari 2, squanders away his advantage  with a performance so ill-aimed ,his misfired comic timing  is a  bigger  joke than anything he does in the  film. One of his chuckle fits involves Nana Patekar’s dhoti  flying about with Akshay  jumping and screaming, ‘Dekh liya’.

This calls  for  a two-minute  silence.

The rest of the cast is lamentably hammy, each outdoing the other with whirls of wiz-dumb, insulting all  and sundry including a poorly aimed joke at Malaika Arora.

Apologize to  the audience  for  pulling this  gag . This is not  a movie. It is  a joke. And an unfunny one.As for the killer’s identity, it doesn’t really matter, as  the actual murder  victim is  good taste. The  entire cast  and crew of Housefull 5 are housed on a luxury ship that gives us  ‘see’ sickness.