Housefull Movie Reviews

At the very start of the film, Sajid Khan pays his respects to several notable names of the 1970s and 1980s, who redefined Hindi commercial cinema. And that gives you ample idea of what to expect from HOUSEFULL, which, very frankly, stresses on wholesome entertainment like those wonderful entertainers made by Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra, Feroz Khan, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, K. Raghavendra Rao, Narendra Bedi, Ravi Tandon

Housefull has enough stupid gags to keep you laughing. The dialogue stays sharp, and the actors are clearly having fun. Akshay, Ritesh and Deepika are in top form, while Lara looks a bit lost. Rampal is stiff, Jiah looks buxom, Randhir looks florid, while Chunky gets cheesy.

Story, sense, meaning... you won't find any of it in Housefull. Yet the film works, majorly because the situations are funny and the performances are top notch. Akshay Kumar is in super form, the actor perfects the act of a loser with a restrained performance. Deshmukh is good and shares good chemistry with Akshay. Boman gets his comic timing right like always. Arjun Rampal is wooden. Chunky Pandey has short - funny role and he does well.

Sajid Khan returns after the success of Heyy Baby, a spilt milkfood and soiled diaper soiree that did manage to tickle your funny bone with its infant histrionics. With Housefull, he doesn't stray much and tries to create a similar riot of hilarious episodes, centred around two couples -- Akshay Kumar-Deepika Padukone and Riteish Deshmukh-Lara Dutta. Trouble lies not so much with the couples as with their relatives: Lara's estranged Pappa, Boman Irani

Finally, what makes Housefull a watchable film is the fact that it aims to entertain and succeeds in doing so irrespective of its negative points. Go watch Housefull if you seek pure no hassles entertainment.

To Sajid's credit, it must be said that he's not attempting a full-blown comedy ? he ensures the emotional quotient is present too. He manages to have loads of 'high points' in the film, which is the core of an entertainer of this kind. The film begins on a slow note and then picks up pace. This time around, Sajid scores when it comes to establishing each of his character's individualities. He weaves these characteristics superbly in the screenplay, which is racy and irreverent.

Housefull is a visual treat. It’s good-looking, tanned and toned. But its story is a hash of old formulas and Sajid Khan is unable to stop it from rambling. He did better last time when he simply stole the script of Three Men and A Baby. This time he seems to have figured that if has three girls in bikinis and administers electric shocks to two funny guys he’d have a winner. The film’s last scene is especially bad — Sajid arranges a lavish set, gets the Queen of England and her beta-bahu but then cracks the worst Santa-Banta joke. While the film was laughing uncontrollably, I contemplated Sajid’s deceased creativity.

Laughter is the subject; a laugh, being a subjective thing, of course. So, laughing gas is forced into the climax. Canned laughter should elicit even more collective laughs. You want to pause for breath. Your brains deserve a break. Khan, the director (Heyy Baby) starts this gig off, paying homage to filmmakers, from Manmohan Desai to Hrishikesh Mukherjee, with K Raghavendra Rao (Himmatwala) thrown somewhere in between. The admission appears a bit full of itself.

In the climax of Housefull, laughing gas is let free in a roomful of people in Buckingham Palace. There’s your entire principal cast and foreign junior artistes – including one playing Queen Elizabeth II who says “Jai Maharashtra” for some weird reason – and they all start laughing uncontrollably, even though they are angry or upset or just irritated with each other. As a viewer, you are angry, upset and irritated too. You are just not laughing uncontrollably. Or laughing at all actually.

This is one more of those 'leave your brains behind' flicks. Frankly, if you do try to stop looking for logic, you may have a blast. The gags are situational and hilarious at times. On other occasions, they do draaaaaaag!

In the name of comedy, Sajid Khan’s Housefull is a slap on your senses as the film sticks to the slapstick genre in every literal sense. Humans go animated while animals are humanized as a Macaw squeals in Marathi, a tiger growls shers and a monkey slaps man – all absolutely unnecessary to the plot. Since there is no plotline in the first half, the tomfoolery and clowning is extended till the interval point. Barring some sporadic funny moments, when you aren’t much amused by the film, laughing gas is released in the climax to induce forced laughter.

Sajid Khan is a lunatic of admirable proportions. There is no one else with quite the same gifts working in Bollywood today, so when he promises us slapstick, we are ready to roll on the floor. But he’s forgotten, in his second outing, the first rule of comedy : pile up silliness upon silliness by all means, but Do Not Give Me A Moment’s Pause. Also, Give Me Only Those Actors Who Can Make Me Laugh. ‘ Housefull’ is much too long, and much too ridden with dull interludes.

In Housefull, director Sajid Khan has only one purpose: he wants to make you laugh. Does he accomplish this? Not often enough. Housefull belongs to the same school of comedy that gave us Welcome, No Entry, Golmaal and All the Best. There is no craft or narrative or characterisation to speak of. Random events and characters, lies and misunderstandings, serve to create a low-IQ comedy.

Housefull' is the kind of pedestrian comedy that makes 'Singh Is King' feel like a Woody Allen gem. It's the kind of film that will stop at nothing to get a laugh out of you. So a monkey is slapped and punched, a black baby becomes the butt of a racist joke, and the words "homo" and "gay" are used liberally as a form of insult. The humor here is strictly low-brow and the gags mostly slapstick. It doesn't help that the director plagiarizes many of his jokes directly from popular American comedies like 'Night at the Museum' and 'Meet The Parents', and even whacks an old gag involving a vacuum cleaner gone beserk from the "Mr Bean" TV series.

If PETA can protest against parrot-sucking, Sajid you have so kindly given a reason to every human rights organisation to bay for your film’s bad blood. Housefull is racist, sexist and homophobic. The Gujarati grandpa almost flings away the black baby and calls the baby’s mother Surpanakha. Later Santa and Banta keep cracking Sardarji jokes. Where are our sensitive protestants who make a hue and cry about the correct length of a Sikh beard?

There is tacky, there is trashy and then there is a whole new depth of shamelessness that can be found in a film that ends with footage of its producer's birthday party. That's right, the closing credits of Sajid Khan's latest film Housefull feature video from Sajid Nadiadwala's birthday party, complete with shots of cake, cast and crew assembled grinningly around the producer. It's an unbelievable new low, and trust Sajid Khan

What’s Good: The acting, the comedy, the dialogues, the songs, the locations, the look and feel.