Imagine casting the hottest actress, the biggest hunk, and a charming actor, everyone showing tremendous amount of skin, especially the hunk and the hottie, fairly decent music, and the film still sucks.

Who will you blame for this debacle? The stars?

Or the director?

Or the producer, himself a director of repute who should be able to spot bullshit from bullion a mile away?

That is the story of Dostana, touted by critics as India’s first coming out film. It doesn’t come out, btw.

To me, it was at best a gag film, a college skit. How a mere sideshow in Kal Ho Na Ho qualifies to become a full-fledged film, beats me!

Abhishek Bachchan was quoted somewhere as saying that the director had narrated the story in two lines to him many years ago, and he was on since then. And that’s the problem with Dostana: it makes eminent two lines. But over two hours? Nah.

So what did our esteemed film critics see that is so different from the film I and many others saw and hated? What was in this film to warrant three stars and more!

Yes John Abraham is absolutely sizzling. He is every woman’s wet dream, and every male neighbour’s envy.

And Priyanka Chopra is good enough to melt a snowman. Or raise the dead.

While Abhishek Bachchan puts in best performance to date, essaying a difficult role with abandon. Both the men let themselves go before the camera, and the naturalness of it simply shows.

That’s the only good point about the film.

Everything else sucked big time. Inordinate length, awful scripting, improbable scenarios, a wooden Bobby Deol who the hottie chooses over the two men after they declare their love for her.. I can go on. For a bombshell singleton she just doesn’t seem to know any straight men, and falls for the first one that comes her way. While the other two, who are shown to sleep around, suddenly don’t have a single woman in their lives apart from their roommate. In all of Miami!? And Shilpa Shetty, who is meant to kick off the proceedings with an item song, doesn’t bother to lip-sync the song, and the editor/director let it go! How shoddy can it get!

Karan Johar, who has a terrible record as director, having helmed only one decent film (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai; the others were disasters, particularly KANK), and a worse one as producer (with KHNH, Kaal and this, I rest my case), should give up film-making and stick to modeling and TV, where he seems to fare much better.