As the title implies, Housefull 5 (2025) is the latest installment in the Housefull franchise. It's not a literal sequel; the movies in the series will share some actors, character names, and a tendency toward broad comedy, but storylines and even genres will change from installment to installment. Housefull 4 was a reincarnation comedy that doubled as a spoof of Indian mythological epics, while 5 is a murder mystery on a boat. It was also released with two different endings, borrowing the central gimmick from Clue. The mystery doesn't get in the way of the broad comedy, though.
Billionaire Rajneet Dobriyal (Rajneet Bedi) is hosting a birthday party on his private cruise ship as it sails from Newcastle to Scotland. (The film doesn't specify where in Scotland.) Before the cruise can get underway, though, Rajneet is discovered dead. This isn't a big surprise, since the party is for Rajneet's 100th birthday, but son Dev (Fardeen Khan) and assorted members of the company and ship's crew decide to keep the death a secret until control of the company can be formally passed on to Dev, to protect the stock price. However, Rajneet's lawyer Lucy (Soundarya Sharma) reveals that Rajneet left a will, which leaves everything to his other son Jolly. None of them have met Jolly, but he will be joining them on the cruise, and he will be bringing his foreign-born wife.
Sure enough, Jolly (Riteish Deshmukh) shows up on time, along with his wife Zara (Sonam Bajwa); she's from Afghanistan. Then Jolly (Abhishek Bachchan) appears with his wife Shashikala (Jacqueline Fernandes) from Sri Lanka. And then Jolly (Akshay Kumar) arrives, with his wife Kaanchi (Nargis Fakhri), from Nepal. Dev asks the ship's doctor to perform blood tests, then the three Jollys are allowed to enjoy the ship while they wait for the results.
That night the ship's cook Pasta (Chunkey Pandey) slips something into everybody's drink, and the three Jollys wake up with the wrong people and no memory of what happened the night before. But somebody has killed the ship's doctor, and the three Jollys are the natural suspects.
The ship's head of security, Batuk Patel (Johnny Lever) locks the Jollys up, and they compare notes. naturally, none of them are real, and none of them are married, so the six team up to solve the mystery before the ship reaches Scotland. Meanwhile, Maya (Chitrangda Singh), the company's CFO, has called for help from her ex husband Baba (Jackie Shroff) and his partner Bhiddu (Sanjay Dutt), two maverick cops who play by their own rules. It's a race to solve the mystery as the bodies pile up, with an extended Weekend at Bernies riff as the Jollys attempt to dispose of Ranjeet's body for reasons.
This is obviously a very silly movie; the Housefull franchise is nothing but very silly movies. Some of the jokes hit better than others; Dutt and Shroff are a perfect parody of Indian movie cops in general and their own respective careers in particular, and Akshay-Jolly's blood feud with the ship's parrot is played perfectly straight. (His rumble with two monkeys is less effective.) Johnny Lever continues to be the King of this sort of broad comedy, mugging for the camera with style and skill.
However there's also a lot of focus on ogling the female cast members. The treatment of lawyer Lucy is particularly egregious, as well as the scene where the Mrs. Jollys assure the audience and one another that the only possible way to sneak into the ship's medical center is by shimmying on their backs through the air ducts. The Housefull series has always dabbled in sexual humor, but at times this comes across as a bit from The Benny Hill Show or Carry On Stabbing. It's very much a Curate's Egg of a movie - good in parts, but I cannot vouch for the whole.
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