I mean, really, two dozen high-fives do not a friend make.

That’s basically Utsav’s approach, and one that is topmost on the list of reasons why the new film misses the mark. Writer-director Kumar Bhattarai appears so determined to establish the sheer coolness of and proximity between his leads that he spends too much time on gratuitous ‘bonding’ scenes, where characters make their affection known, as frequently and with as much physical and verbal enthusiasm as they can muster—lest viewers forget they’re in the presence of Best Friends—but fails to create realistic personalities or indeed a compelling context around them. With the result that Utsav often feels like an extended version of one of those Ncell ‘My5’ ads: hip, young, colourful, well-shot and maybe even fun for a little while, but impossible to endure over a running time of more than two hours.

We find our five friends—Jimba (Saugat Malla), Naren (Sanjog Koirala), Kaji (Gaurav Pahari), Urvashi (Menuka Pradhan) and Nisha (Prakriti Shrestha)—living it up in college. With little by way of responsibility, they’re essentially free to horse around, fall in love, get into little tiffs and make up as they please. Unfortunately, these carefree days in the sun are coming to an end. Jimba, who harbours somewhat inflated dreams of becoming a top music sensation some day (he has tattoos to prove it too), and whose family life has always been a touch on the complicated side, is soon to come into a full-blown crisis, and it will rip him away from the group and his passion. Of course, the others won’t remain immune to the pressures of adulthood, beckoning just around the corner, either. In other words, testing times are ahead, and it remains to be seen how far their friendship will hold up under the strain.

‘Strain’ might be overselling it a bit. Whatever obstacles come in the way of our heroes are either too miniscule to matter, or don’t make much sense. Take Jimba’s predicament, for instance, which comes to form the crux of the film later on; it’s puzzling that he would languish so in self-imposed exile instead of going ahead and confiding in his friends. What’s stopping him? It’s the sort of motivational incongruity that dogs Utsav time and again. The plot is, overall, pretty unimaginative; there are few surprises along the way, nothing we haven’t seen elsewhere at some point and very little organic humour—most of the scripted jokes are of the crude, barely-worth-a-snort variety—to alleviate the sense of tedium that accumulates by the end.

Watching Malla squeezing his big personality and physique into a role like this—so restrictive and so very undemanding—and knowing what the actor is capable of, from all we’ve seen on stage and on screen, is a bit painful. I wish, as I’m sure others do, that someone would offer the guy a part befitting his talents already (also hopefully one that doesn’t call for the kind of outlandish, distracting ‘do’s he’s donned in his last few films); this just isn’t for him. Koirala, Pahari and Pradhan are reliable enough, pushing their one-dimensional characters as far as they will go—though Koirala moves a patch beyond the others in the second half of the film where he’s given slightly more to do. As for Shrestha, she’s been relegated the role of eye-candy, which I suppose is just as well considering her shaky screen presence. Given how flimsily sketched the leads are here, it’s little wonder then that the supporting cast barely register—excepting Sandip Chhetri, that is, who pulls off a hilariously over-the-top antagonist.

Had Utsav been prodigiously edited, run time chopped by half at least and pacing snappier, it would’ve probably made for a tolerable—if still entirely forgettable—watch. But the film is just too weak on most counts to sustain attention for as long as it’s been stretched, even by fluff standards. This is no enjoyable jaunt into the lives of good pals, and there are no insights into friendship to be found here, just an exhausting slog through hollow, ineffectual gestures.