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 Having watched several slick Karan Johar productions, I have no doubt that Johar spares no expense when it comes to his films. So it is a pity indeed that he cannot afford to hire scriptwriters above a mental age of five. “I hate Luv Storys” is the kind of insufferable tripe that poor scripting, a boring storyline and a clueless director can produce.
Here are the basics : Casanova-ish Boy meets Girl, Girl already attached to Mr. Perfect abhors Boy. In true Bollywood-ian style, the repulsion turns into attraction, but filmi problems persist leading to a long, drawn-out yawn of a film. As far as story goes this film comes up with zilch – all we have are conversations where the lead pair talk to themselves and to each other. They also talk to their bosses and co-workers (they both work on the film-set), and it is quite remarkable as to how inane, uninteresting and humorless the dialogues are. The Girl aka Simran (the very pretty Sonam) is into major introspection and apt to ponder way too much on the meaningless nuances of the Boy’s conversation (“Is my life really filmi ? Is there nothing like Perfect ?”) but that is as far as she gets to doing anything. I rather wish that she’d have slit a wrist or jumped off a cliff instead of just batting her fake eyelashes – that’d have woken me up from the film-induced stupor. The Boy aka Jay Dhingra (Imran Khan) is cast from the true-blue Johar mould. He is into anything in a skirt, treats women as a use-and-throw commodity, and is probably the most annoying screen character I have had the displeasure of watching this year. If that doesn’t make your insides go all warm and fuzzy ladies, there’s more – he’s got a dodgy work ethic, is boring and has major pretensions at “coolness” (doesn’t use his last name, since it is not cool enough, and shortens his first to “J”). Quite the dreamboat, our "J".
The emoting from Sonam and Imran is quite flat, and I’m blaming weak direction for this. Sonam who did quite well in Delhi-6, can’t quite manage it here. And Khan who seems the tailor-made chocolate hero, can’t quite beguile us with the filmi clichés he’s supposed to portray. The film does carry the Johar mark; it manages to poke fun at fat people, show us various graphs on how hotness figures vs. fat/other undesirable traits in a female, and compares women to busses (when one goes, another comes – didn’t you know ?) and make various unnecessary references to sex (we talk about S.E.X, we must be hip – yeah, baby?). I would tell you more, but there is not much more to tell. The 2 hr 15 min length is way too long; we wouldn’t have lost much if this film had been cut by 80% (or better still if it had not been made at all). On the bright side, the film takes a stab at humor by laughing at the sorry state of the film-making industry and attempting to lampoon Karan Johar himself, by basing J and Simran’s boss Veer Kapoor (Samir Soni) on him. The songs are great, and Sonam is luminous. Everything else – the story, characterization, dialogues and direction can be summed up in just one descriptive word : RUBBISH!
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I’m not aiming for perfection here; all I’d like is to have remotely likeable people as the lead characters. Externally Simran and Jay look like good-looking young individuals presumably with brains in working condition. Apparently that’s only for the trailers/teasers – as you get into the film you realize that both are actually children in adult bodies, with their minds stuck around the teen years (post-watch I’d say the director is stuck there too).