Release date:
|
June 3, 2016
|
Director:
|
Farhad-Sajid
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Akshay Kumar,
Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan, Boman Irani, Jacqueline Fernandez, Lisa
Haydon, Nargis Fakhri, Jackie Shroff, Chunkey Pandey
Hindi
|
One of the formulae most often
visited by Bollywood comedies is the business of assigning a distinctive quirk
to major characters in a story. The writers of Housefull 3 are clearly very enthusiastic about this device since
they use it rather generously in their film.
And so: Sandy suffers from
Dissociative Identity Disorder, which results in the emergence of his
violence-prone, self-destructive alter ego Sundi every time someone utters the
word “Indian”. Teddy is congenitally confused by words, for instance saying “tawaif” for “wife”. Gangster Urja Nagre
(Jackie Shroff) has a penchant for coining acronyms at the drop of a hat, such
as ATM for “Ab tu marega” and WTF for
“Wednesday Thursday Friday”. And the film’s three leading ladies apparently
speak such poor English that they fill their Hindi speech with literal
translations of popular English phrases.
Not counting the insensitivity
towards a serious mental disorder, the rest are ruses that, when intelligently
used and well-timed, could actually make for a good, old-fashioned, rollicking
nonsense comedy. Remember Mrs Malaprop from Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals and Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing? The problem
arises because writer-directors Farhad-Sajid and their co-writer Rajan Agarwal
appear to have invested little thought in their film once they came up with a
quirk per character. Worse, they over-use each one till kingdom come.
The ladies, for instance,
dispense so many mixed, confused metaphors that you could fill up a few pages
by just listing them. Here are some that I can recall off the top of my
head:
“kaamwaali gayee toh kaamwaali gayee” for “let bygones be bygones”
“bandook ke bachche” for “son of a gun”
“nimbu
ki roshni se door raho” for “stay away from the limelight” and
“ghadi ke upar” for “once upon a time”.
Firstly, whatever be the solo
merit of any of these lines, picture a film in which one of these comes up once
every few minutes and they get progressively less imaginative with each passing
moment. Second, these lines are a poor quality lift of an idea from Bol Bachchan in which Ajay Devgn’s
character insisted on speaking English although he was terrible at it. His
version of “don’t poke your nose…” was: “When elder get cosy, younger don’t put
nosy.” It was all quite ridiculously hilarious. Farhad-Sajid, who wrote the
dialogues for Bol Bachchan, seem
unable to even effectively borrow from themselves in this film.
That is Housefull 3 for you, taking the audience lightly with lazy
scripting, skating along instead on the charisma and goofiness of its central
male star, goodwill for many of the remaining cast members and occasional
patches of witty absurdity.
The story is set in London where
shipping magnate Batook Patel (Boman Irani) lives with his daughters Ganga
(Jacqueline Fernandez), Jamuna (Lisa Haydon) and Saraswati (Nargis Fakhri).
Patel refuses to get them married for reasons we discover by the by. A fake
prediction – never mind what – by a fake astrologer (Chunkey Pandey) leads the
women to request their respective boyfriends to lie to their Dad.
Ganga is a doctor whose football
playing beau Sandy (Akshay Kumar), also her patient, must pretend that he is a
paraplegic. Jamuna is dating race car driver Teddy (Riteish Deshmukh), who is
compelled to play-act blindness. And the man Saraswati loves, aspiring rapper
Bunty (Abhishek Bachchan), is forced to feign muteness. A subsequent
misunderstanding results in another character thinking that Sandy is blind,
Teddy is mute and Bunty is wheelchair bound. The result is confounded
confusion.
That is not necessarily a bad
thing. Confusion can be a good thing in comedy. Now that it has been used for
centuries to evoke laughter though, it takes a helluva team to extract anything
more than the usual clichés from a story of identity mix-ups, lies within lies
within lies and other mad muddles. The makers of Housefull 3 are not that team.
This is what comes of pointedly
aiming only at viewers who are easily pleased. The first film in this series –
directed by Sajid Khan – was fun despite its unabashed stupidity (possibly because of it), but it has been downhill
since then. Khan directed Housefull 2
and managed to extract some laughs despite the fact that it was crude and
callous, featuring, among other things, a rape joke, a leering father-in-law
making advances towards his future bahu,
a crocodile biting Deshmukh’s bottom and a python latching on to Shreyas
Talpade’s penis. Large parts of Housefull
3 are just flat.
The writing is also curiously
confused and lackadaisical. For instance, when Patel introduces us to his
daughters, he describes them with great pride as “sanskaari” girls, at which point all three are clad in Indian
attire. Later, they are shown leaving the house surreptitiously in skimpy
Western wear, to prove that they were fooling their Dad about their adherence
to Bhartiya sanskriti and sabhyata. Yet in later scenes they
blithely appear before Daddy in revealing Western clothing and he does not bat
an eyelid, as though that plot point has been forgotten.
And oh puhleeeeeeease, do not
bore us with that cliché that critics do not like light-hearted comedies, which
is being fed to viewers by some producers. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Gol Maal and Chupke Chupke, Priyadarshan’s Hungama,
many of David Dhawan’s collaborations with Govinda, Abhinav Kashyap’s Dabangg … I can rattle off the names of
nutty films I’ve loved. The Akshay Kumar-starrers Singh Is Kinng, Welcome, Namastey London and Desi Boyz too had plenty to offer fans of humour.
And puhleeeeeease, do not confuse
crassness with political incorrectness. Two of the best American television
comedies running in India right now – The
Big Bang Theory and Two Broke Girls –
are terribly non PC and make all kinds of jokes directed at various races,
religious groups and across genders. Thing is, they know how to be irreverent
without being gross or creepy. Towards the end of Housefull 3, when each of the three male leads ends up with a woman
other than his girlfriend in his arms, Sandy orders them to pair up with the
right woman in these words: “apne apne
maal ke paas jaao yaar.”
It is a wonder why Kumar – whose
goofiness is perhaps the best thing about this film – does not realise that
there is a place in this world and box-office success to be earned from
understated comedy. I mean, Ajay Devgn persists with the Golmaal series but he has also tried his hand at the relatively
low-key, thoroughly enjoyable Atithi Tum
Kab Jaoge, right? Kumar seems not to have the mindspace for something like
that, although he clearly has the talent for it. Even within the arena of
mindlessness and loudness, he seems to be taking his audience for granted too
often with the likes of Housefull 3
and Entertainment (which,
incidentally, was also directed by Farhad-Sajid).
Bachchan Junior has always had a
pleasant screen presence, and it is nice to see him in a film after such a long
gap, but his role here has very little meat. Deshmukh is one of the best
comedians in contemporary Bollywood, but he is criminally under-utilised. The
three women here are treated as visual attractions and nothing else, which is
disappointing because Haydon was such a live wire in Queen (2014) and Fakhri, who is limited elsewhere, revealed a funny
bone and a charming ability to let her hair down in the Varun Dhawan-starrer Main Tera Hero (2014).
The only actor other than Kumar
who makes somewhat of an impact in Housefull
3 is Boman Irani who lifts the film in many of his scenes. Jackie Shroff,
who deserves better, is wasted.
The indolence in the writing of Housefull 3 is best illustrated by the
profusion of self-referential jokes in the film. I mean, c’mooooooonnnnn, how
many times are we expected to be amused by Deshmukh breaking into Marathi in
the heat of a moment? Is it really laugh-worthy that he addresses his
girlfriend Jenny a.k.a. Jamuna in the film as Genelia? Yawn. And how many
mentions of the Bachchan family will we hear around Abhishek? C’mooooonnnnn,
think of something new!
Rating
(out of five): *1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
Running time:
|
134 minutes
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Anna MM Vetticad,Anna Vetticad,Indian cinema,Bollywood,Housefull
series,Housefull 3,Farhad-Sajid,Akshay
Kumar,Riteish Deshmukh,Abhishek Bachchan,Jacqueline Fernandez,Lisa Haydon,Nargis
Fakhri
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