Housefull 3 (Hindi)
Director: Sajid Farhad
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Abhishek Bachchan, Riteish Deshmukh, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nargis Fakhri, Lisa Haydon, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff
As expected, the trailer of Housefull 3 gives much of the film away. Batuk Patel (Boman Irani), a rich Gujju businessman in London, doesn't want to marry off his three daughters because of the curse of broken marriages running in his extended family.
All hell breaks loose when he learns that all three sanskari girls – Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswati (Jacqueline Fernandes, Nargis Fakhri and Lisa Haydon) – have a boyfriend each.
A car racer called Teddy (Riteish Deshmukh), a rapper called Bunty (Abhishek Bachchan) and a footballer called Sandy (Akshay Kumar). The boys do manage to get an entry into the girls’ mansion but by playing blind, mute and crippled.
The confusion gets confounded when this role-playing has to get interchanged. The blind has to turn mute, the mute has to become crippled and the one playing crippled has to turn blind.
All for the sake of the Indian don, Urja Nagare (Jackie Shroff) to whom Batuk owes a royal sum of Rs. 5,000 crores. Well there is more, but that will be telling it all.
So with the story out of the way, all that's left to follow in the film is whether the situations and gags are funny enough. Unfortunately, they aren't.
What you get are three silly, giggly girls who attempt to bring the house down by some inane, literal translations of English words to Hindi. One can't quite go looking for political correctness in such a film. But Housefull 3 doesn't know where it wants to stand. It’s Akshay Kumar who gets the maximum play as the footballer suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Abhishek Bachchan has a natural flair for comedy but here he is toned down to the extent of becoming lacklustre. It’s left to Jackie Shroff then, gun in hand and blade hidden inside his mouth, who displays more charisma than the rest of the cast put together. Wish there was more of him.
NAMRATA JOSHI
