Housefull 5, Stolen: Reviews This Week

Housefull 5 Has Akshay Kumar Doing Akshay Kumar Things

Nothing about Housefull 5 looks good. The film has 19 actors, an ensemble so off-kilter that it can convince anyone about the dearth of employment in Bollywood.

Dir: Tarun Mansukhani

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan, Jacqueline Fernandez

Playing in: Theatres

THERE IS SOMETHING INNATELY AWKWARD about enjoying Akshay Kumar doing comedy. The feeling is similar to reading old scrapbooks and being amused at an earlier version of oneself. Or, meeting someone from the past with thorny opinions and enjoying their company briefly. To enjoy Akshay Kumar doing comedy is to reckon with his problematic brand of humour and appreciate his genius of making even the most worn-out jokes fun. If there is a conundrum here, it is only exemplified in his latest, Housefull 5, a film version of the actor’s absurd hilarity.

Nothing about Housefull 5 looked good. The film has 19 actors, an ensemble so off-kilter that it can convince anyone about the dearth of employment in Bollywood. Written by Farhad Samji and Tarun Mansukhani, the thriller comedy has two endings (5A and 5B) in an economy when makers are struggling to end one film well. And, more crucially, it is an extension of a franchise that has a history of mining humor at the expense of every living being except men.

The bad news is that nothing much has changed. Monkeys make an appearance, a previous gag of a vacuum cleaner killing a bird is repeated, middle-aged men continue to lust after young women (Shreyas Talpade, unfairly, shoulders most of the cringe scenes), and women are reduced to the foot of the footnotes. They are only included for reaction shots. Multiple scenes are stitched together and not one of them makes sense. Ranjeet’s character (also called Ranjeet) dies thrice and still is never fully dead, Johny Lever’s character enters a kitchen without clothes thinking it is a sauna, Nana Patekar arrives for a cruise wearing dhoti, and Fardeen Khan refuses to emote even when his life depends on it. To put it succinctly: Housefull 5 reiterates, perpetuates and affirms every callous joke all of the Housefull franchise is known for.

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Stolen: A Breathless Survival Thriller Headlined By A Spectacular Abhishek Banerjee

Karan Tejpal's Stolen is a rare film about class that unfolds with its ear close to the ground. One that resists making empty statements by checking its privilege as part of the critique.

Dir: Karan Tejpal

Cast: Abhishek Banerjee, Shubham Vardhan, Mia Maelzer

Streaming on: Prime Video

A LOT ABOUT KARAN TEJPAL'S Stolen is vague. The landscape looks familiar, but no names are given, and an angry mob keeps gathering steam, but their rooted investment is unclear. A woman claims to be pregnant without a man involved, and a deserted mansion is deemed cursed without a direct reason. Such obscurity feels deliberate. Stolen is as specific as encompassing, as much a story as a statement. The survival thriller is about people and society.

There is little novelty about the overlap, but Tejpal’s film, breathless in its pace, straddles the many worlds of its creation with distinct urgency. It manages to hold our gaze close to certain faces while churning the fear of the unknown. The result is a rare film about class that unfolds with its ear close to the ground. One that resists making empty statements by checking its privilege as part of the critique.

In that sense, Stolen is eerily reminiscent of Navdeep Singh’s NH10 (2015), a slasher thriller that contained multitudes of horror in its proposition: what happens when the urban enters the lawless rural jungle? What happens when a part of India collides with another? Written by Swapnil Salkar, Gaurav Dhingra and Tejpal, Stolen asks the same questions and keeps addressing them during its runtime.

— IS

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