Film Review: ‘Housefull-4’

By Neha Bora

There are films which you watch only to find out that even today story telling isn’t the norm in Bollywood. Housefull 4 is one such film in the same tradition of lazy storytelling, inappropriate jokes and absent logic. It follows the story of three brothers Harry (Akshay Kumar), afflicted with strange disorder which causes him to lose memory of the immediate events on hearing loud noises, Max (Bobby Deol), who is a muscular henchmen for his other two brothers, and Roy (Riteish Deshmukh) , who tends to get his gender-verbs mixed up for no apparent reason.

They owe one underworld don, ‘Michael Bhai’ a large sum of money and so have now formed relations with three sisters played by Kriti Sanon, Kriti Kharbanda and Pooja Hegde, with a rich father with a plan of marrying them for their money. The sisters are actually the same character, indistinguishable except for their names, they even echo most of each others dialogues. Thebrothers are the kind of men who hire a goon to harass their girlfriends and then sing “maine tujhe gundon se bachaya hai…ek chumma to banta hai.”

But, no matter the logic, their marriage is fixed and by the spinning globe of fate they land up in Sitamgarh, Ujjain in India for their destination wedding. On reaching the hostel, the entire entourage is recognized by the bell boy ‘Akhri Pasta’ (ChunkeyPandey) as belonging to the royal family from the year 1419.

Harry is the first one who has a ‘vision/hallucination’ of this past life and with a little searching he remembers everything and finds out that his brothers and he were marrying women who were in the previous incarnation lovers to one of the other brother. This is a classic ‘Houseful’ feature, somehow the teams of ‘Houseful’ are very intrigued by the idea of exchanging wives and hence, they play with this idea in each Houseful movie.

What ensues next is Akshay Kumar’s struggle to remind everyone of the time when he was a bald despicable prince, Roy or Riteish Deshmukh (once again sadly) a trans-gender or queer dance guru, Max or Deol (like always) a bodyguard to the princesses who are in present times their lovers.

Some points to remember during the flashback in the film were when Harry who was Prince Bala 600 years ago sexually harasses the dance guru whose gender is not defined in the film and at one point someone pretends to have been raped by one of the men who on insistence agree to accept and marry her.

There is also the senseless reincarnation of not just the three brothers and their love interests but also that of the entire cast of the film with one female character even reincarnating in the form of a male character. On one hand, the heroes will go to any lengths in order to prevent themselves from committing the sin of marrying their present day girlfriends but who were their ‘bhabhis’ from previous lifetime, the one character reincarnated in a different gender in the present time, is blatantly shunned and ridiculed by his/her lover from the previous incarnation.

The songs of the film too seem to exist just to fulfill the requirements of the movie format that the Bollywood audience is used to seeing. A lack of story has been an essential trait of the Houseful franchise of movies, which had always aimed at crass half-baked humor.

The young men in the theatre, the films intended audience, too only clapped at scenes of women dancing or removing their clothes or at the repetitive and overacted ‘I don’t know’ given to the character of Akshay Kumar by writer director Farhad Samji.

The audience might find it very hard to laugh at even a single joke, because despite the use of a lot of rhyme from previous Bollywood songs the film is without any rhythm. All the various forms of cross-references from other Bollywood movies fall flat like a dead fish because no effort has been put into finding a place for them in the film.

The acting is minimal. All the actors recognize the depth of the script and act accordingly. They have acted as much as the three pigeons that are also part of the film. The computer generated sequence in the film where the opening credits roll in, is the most exciting part of the entire film and all goes downhill from there on.

The film is nothing but images of rich people living in royal palaces and hotels thrust upon the audience alongside appropriations of all and every form. Even if the other films don’t get a good review, the audience canskip ‘Housefull 4’ with any ‘FOMO’ . Filmi Files is the best to place to look for online movies reviews.

FF Ratings: *