Housefull 2 India Today Movie Review by Kaveree Bamzai

Director: Sajid Khan
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Asin

Ever wondered why Sunny Leone has had such an easy entry into Bollywood? Well, because for years Bollywood heroines have been dressing and acting like porn stars. Try Housefull 2 to see why. The actresses spend much of the time dressed in lingerie, all of them have fake pouts, enhanced by liberal doses of botox) and all of them have a tendency to slap their butts and pass it off as a dance step. The actors are no better. In Housefull 2 Akshay Kumar has a trademark lip movement accompanied with an orgasmic “aah” which would be more suited to a porn stellar.

But what can I say? I was surrounded by a hall where the audience was in splits and little children-why do parents do this to their offspring?-were copying Akshay’s orgasmic style. It can only happen in India. A bare bum scene in The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo will be cut though it had an A certificate but a film like Housefull 2 with its gay jokes and sex talk (including a scene where a python attacks Shreyas Talpade’s crotch and we’re meant to laugh) will be a family favourite.

So yes folks, the tasteless and talentless bunch is back, bigger and bustier. Added to the mess is the wonderful Rishi Kapoor, the only saving grace in this trash. He insists on wearing a bow tie at all times, even with his achkan, and sporting a tophat and umbrella. And everything everyone does is retrograde. He and his “najayaz” brother Randhir Kapoor (the film is so lazy it doesn’t even give them fake names and calls them Chintu and Dabboo) want their daughters (called what else Heena and Bobby, a doffing of the hat to Raj Kapoor) to marry rich men and see no problem in them cohabiting with them as long as they have money. Mithun Chakraborty plays the rich father of a rich son (Riteish Deshmukh) and wants him to marry his old friend’s daughter because he gave him his word (I told you 19th century plot). And of course there are the four friends, Akshay Kumar, a randy good for nothing who seems to have stayed over from the sets of Desi Boyz) and ditto for John Abraham. There’s also Shreyas Talpade, a photographer who only takes sexy shots for calendars and we are expected to believe the very large Zarine Khan is one of them.

The girls, when they’re not prancing around in their nightwear, insist on wearing the same clothes in different colours (must have made things easier for the so-called costume designer). And oh, before I forget, there’s old time villan Ranjeet, who plays a guy called Dr Vasna ke Pujari, a the-rapist (get it?). He is Akshay’s father and insists on wearing his black silk shirt and a thick silver chain with a naked woman as pendant (what do you expect?). And Malaika Arora Khan who has dialogues for a change and I could tell you what they were had I not been distracted by her Botoxed pout.

But with dialogues like langurs, have my angurs and mera naam hai Sosa and inko maine paala posa, you can imagine what sort of mayhem is unleashed.

Insults are traded liberally: Botox budiya, sukdi Bombil, ugrawadi octopus, are just some of them. But there’s a scene in which Fifi the crocodile nearly bites Riteish Deshmukh and Akshay Kumar in the butt. I wish it had succeeded. It would have been a much shorter movie. I wish.