Masand: 'Housefull' makes you cringe

By Rajeev Masand, CNN-IBN

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Ritesh Deshmukh, Arjun Rampal

Director: Sajid Khan

In the climax of director Sajid Khan's 'Housefull', a cylinder of laughing gas is accidentally released during a state function at Buckingham Palace.

Hundreds of gathered guests break into unstoppable laughter, and even the famously stiff-lipped Queen cracks a smile. Ironically, by now your own laughter has long since dried up.

'Housefull' is the kind of pedestrian comedy that makes 'Singh Is King' feel like a Woody Allen gem. It's the kind of film that will stop at nothing to get a laugh out of you. So a monkey is slapped and punched, a black baby becomes the butt of a racist joke, and the words "homo" and "gay" are used liberally as a form of insult.

The humor here is strictly low-brow and the gags mostly slapstick. It doesn't help that the director plagiarizes many of his jokes directly from popular American comedies like 'Night at the Museum' and 'Meet The Parents', and even whacks an old gag involving a vacuum cleaner gone beserk from the "Mr Bean" TV series.