Sukanya Verma

Ask me the plot of the last four Housefull movies and all I can recall are crowded frames filled with cringey, racist humour glorifying dumb blokes, dim-witted women, scowling fathers, random animals and rampant innuendoes designed to appease the lowest common denominator in the audience. Like or loathe, the shtick is raking in the moolah and now there’s a fifth film in the franchise keeping up its tradition of revelling in stupidity and birdbrain imagination. Only Housefull 5 is so rubbish, you’d think none of the actors, 17 or so of them, have any inkling as to where the script is heading and take the extempore challenge too far. Out of ideas for a while now and resorting to gimmicks like two endings – luring viewers into double viewings and ordeal – this Tarun Mansukhani directed fool fest, is the most idiotic thing I’ve watched this year so far.

In a country bursting at its seams, where dissatisfaction is a perennial feeling among the underclass and prospect is solely reserved for the privileged, sanity hangs by a thread. And when all hell does break loose, it’s not just those numb to the pain of being brushed off but even the blameless that will find themselves crushed under the aftermath of blind rage. There’s no justifying mob lynching. There’s no understanding it either. What triggers a large group of people to attack a single person, in most cases not guilty of the alleged crime, and unleash their dormant animal and defend it as justice?

It’s only fitting that Rajkummar Rao’s newest comedy should be about him being stuck in a time loop and unable to find a breakthrough. Lately that’s how watching the actor feels in one interchangeable performance after another wherein he’s a perennially exasperated small town lad grappling with rom-com crisis. A similar air of déjà vu envelops his character Ranjan Tiwari in Karan Sharma’s Bhool Chuk Maaf as well as the viewer while beholding familiar sights and stock. Only this time the setting is Banaras teeming with visuals of ghats, genda phools and gobar.

When a prince of a dippy, strapped-for-cash royal family meets a pushy possessor of a hospitality start-up, foreplay makes way for a financially profitable proposition. Creator Rangita Pritish Nandy’s modern-day fairy tale, directed by Priyanka Ghose and Nupur Asthana, is tailor-made for rom-com vibes. While the makers embellish the couple’s ‘blow hot and cold’ equation with ample of visual razzmatazz, their wet blanket chemistry and dowdily-crafted scenes of ‘opposites attract’ prove to be a buzzkill for its eight scatterbrained episodes. Add to that a cliffhanger ending and unresolved issues that follow once skeletons pop out of the closet, the prolonging seems unwarranted.

Whether or not a film is crying for a sequel is decided by its box office success or an actor’s desire to return in a role promising sure shot glory. Audiences rarely have a say in these matters. When Raid, Rajkumar Gupta’s moderately budgeted tribute to the income tax department’s unsung heroes came out in 2018, it offered a welcome change of pace from Ajay Devgn’s brooding, bashing heroes. Watching him peacefully pursue the path of justice in a tax-defaulting MP’s home along with a battery of officers, while the mood continually shifted between humour and hostility, rendered Raid an unshowy strength. A muted Devgn is back on the fore as the 1980s’ IT star Amay Patnaik in Raid 2 with bigger targets in mind. Though he is as nonviolent as ever, there’s little originality by way of script, which is a classic case of more of the same.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s gift to embody individuals committed to their ideology is frequent fodder for cinema. After playing the unwavering Dashrath Manjhi in Manjhi: The Mountain Man, illustrious author Saadat Hasan Manto in Manto, blunt politician and Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray in Thackeray and psychotic serial killer Raman Raghav in Raman Raghav 2.0, the actor plays a 1990s Goan hero in the eponymous Costao. Customs officer Costao Fernandes rose to fame for standing his ground against an influential smuggling kingpin when the latter dragged him to court for the murder of his younger brother.

The spice factor is sorely missing in director duo Kookie Gulati and Robbie Grewal’s bland, banal heist caper, which has nothing to do with Vijay Anand’s 1967 classic of the same name except a cursorily doffed hat. Already abundant Hindi hack jobs of the ilk have moviegoers well-versed in the art of big-screen robbery involving the same old tricks of nicking passwords and fingerprints, cracking codes and combinations, dodging high security and noisy alarms to feel any real excitement around Jewel Thief’s surprisingly low stakes burglary. It doesn’t help that the sought-after Africa Ka Kohinoor, known as the Red Sun, looks like a cheap Christmas ornament that our protagonists tell us is valued at Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion) in the underworld market.

As is usually the case, the untold story in Kesari Chapter 2 is actually an inaccurate one wherein history is juggled and chronology is shuffled for the sake of drama. True identities and occurrences are evoked but tweaked beyond recognition to design a chapter in India’s pre-Independence era that sounds far more sensational when told through the prism of film-making. So a case of libel becomes a fight against genocide and a devil’s advocate transforms into an F-word blasting freedom fighter as fictionalised twists and turns are tossed until an over five-week long courtroom battle acquires the air of a spectacle that’s nationalist and cinematic in equal measure.