In a slide at the start of Housefull, director Sajid Khan credits as his inspiration Blake Edwards and six Indian filmmakers who were prominent in the 1970s. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d added The Three Stooges, Benny Hill and Georges Feydeau.
Come to think of it, even Feydeau, the French master of farce, may have been hard pressed to concoct as many mistaken identities, coincidences and contrivances as Khan and co-writers Milap Zaveri and Vibha Singh jam into this Bollywood fantasy. The characters are caricatures, the humour is 90% slapstick, and to my Australian ear, almost every song bar the big closing production number is forgettable.
I sat stony-faced through the two and a half hours plus movie, but some members of the audience at the first session at my local multiplex last night laughed often and loudly, so I’m guessing this will appeal to diehard Bollywood fans.
The prologue establishes Arush (Akshay Kumar) as the world’s unluckiest man, emphasized by a bland song called 'He’s Such a Loser." After being spurned by yet another woman, he quits his job at a Macau casino (where he’d been employed to bring bad luck to the patrons) and sets off to London to join his childhood friend Bob (Riteish Deshmukh). Somehow Arush manages to enter Bob’s apartment and he goes to sleep in the marital bed. Bob and wife Hetal (Lara Dutta), who work at a London casino as a croupier and Playboy bunny-type waitress, arrive home. Hetal gets ready to slip into something sexy, Bob jumps on the bed and starts cuddling the figure he assumes in his wife, and the distressed Hetal crashes through a window. That absurdity sets the tone for what follows. To make amends, Arush cleans their apartment, only to cause havoc with an over-amped vacuum cleaner.
Arush soon finds himself in an arranged marriage with Devika (Jiah Khan), the seemingly coy daughter of the London casino boss. Their honeymoon at a hotel in an Italian coastal resort run by a painfully unfunny man named Pasta turns farcical when Arush confesses he’s a virgin, giving rise to the song 'I Don’t Know What To Do." Presumably Devika taught him the basics, but the next morning he discovers her on the beach with her true love and she admits she only married him to secure her stake in her father’s fortune.
Devastated, Arush tries to drown himself and is miraculously rescued by hottie Sandy (Deepika Padukone). He’s smitten with her, she’s not best pleased when she discovers he’d just got married, but it looks like love will prevail.
To cut to the chase, back in London the two couples decide to rent a mansion to impress two visitors from India, Hetal’s estranged father and Sandy’s brother Major Krishna (Arjun Rampal), the head of the country’s military intelligence. This also involves an elaborate pretence of switching identities, taking to ludicrous lengths the film’s oft-repeated line, 'A lie isn’t a lie if it’s said for a noble cause." Bollywood devotees may well find all that hysterically funny, but I don’t see anything clever or amusing in characters repeatedly slapping each other across the face (a la The Three Stooges), chasing each other as in a Benny Hill skit, or sleepwalking to the tune 'Papa Will Wake Up." A running gag about 'homos" is also questionable, as is an earlier sequence when Arush bitch-slaps a monkey (presumably CGI-created) which stole Sandy’s phone.
All this leads to a tediously long sequence in Buckingham Palace involving look-alikes for the Queen, Charles and Camilla, and a canister of laughing gas. The production number 'Dhanno," set in a disco, evidently a redo of a 1980s classic, is impressive.
Khan, who made the 2007 Bollywood hit, Heyy Babyy, which also starred Kumar, directs with a megaphone. As for the cast, well, acting isn’t required as much as an ability to mug shamelessly, scream, shout, flail arms and fall over. Kumar, who looks a bit like Steve Carell without the charm, is likable enough, Rampal has a real presence as the only semi-believable character, and the three girls are stunners.
