Housefull 3
Director: Sajid-Farhad
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nargis Fakhri, Lisa Haydon
One star
As the third instalment of an inexplicably successful franchise, Housefull 3 continues in the same distasteful vein as its predecessors.
Directed and written by the duo Sajid-Farhad, the film is full of racist and sexist humour, plus offensive jokes at the cost of people with disabilities.
Three buffoons, Teddy (Riteish Deshmukh), Bunty (Abhishek Bachchan) and Sandy (Akshay Kumar), wangle their way into the London mansion of Batook Patel (Boman Irani), a rich Gujarati businessman, to convince him to let them marry his daughters. He won’t let his girls – Ganga (Jacqueline Fernandez), Jamuna (Lisa Haydon) and Saraswati (Nargis Fakhri) – marry because of a silly family curse.
The girls are in love with the deadbeat boys, who gain entry to their house by pretending to be disabled. There is also an Indian don, Urja Nagre (Jackie Shroff), and Aakhri Pasta (Chunky Pandey), a returning character from the franchise, thrown into the mix.
With the setting established, Sajid-Farhad go on to include every crass, dull joke you might have already seen on the internet. Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswati, all three of them, have poor Hindi language skills and literally translate words from English. Adding to this infantile wordplay is Teddy, who has a habit of mixing up words, which leads to “gems” such as tawaif (courtesan) instead of wife ... you get the drift.
Sandy, meanwhile, has a dissociative identity disorder that surfaces every time he hears the word "Indian", a role he hams to death. Bachchan is entirely forgettable, which, in a movie like Housefull 3, is actually a good thing. Irani's Patel is more Gujarati than anyone you'll ever meet and grates on already frayed nerves.
The movie rambles on, making seriously offensive jokes about the domestic help in Patel’s mansion and caricaturing disabled people – at one point, Sandy literally has ants in his pants but can’t move without giving away that he is not disabled – over and over again. It all ends with a predictably pointless climax that just cannot arrive quickly enough.
It is sometimes said that to enjoy films such as the Housefull movies, viewers need to leave their brains at home. For this third assault on the senses, the surgical removal of the brain is needed, not temporarily switching it off.
What can one say about a movie where each character strives, not to be the best, but the absolute worst? Avoid.
artslife@thenational.ae
