Of all the reviewers, you are the most perceptive. You are bang on target in interpreting the climax. I too came to the same conclusion about Charlie’s fate in the movie. I agree with you completely that Charlie did not survive the gun shot. The happy ending scene was his dying dream. Not many people got it. I am sure Vishal Bhardwaj himself will confirm this in the future.

My wild guess(at the risk of being labeled a movie-geek-who-reads-Hollywood-movie-forums-a-lot ) is that all that they showed in the end was Faheed’s dying thoughts, and were part of a dream . Two reasons why I think so :-
1) the happy ending was shown rather abruptly, i.e they didn’t tell how the good(relatively) guys survived the inferno, while the others were cooked in a tandoor.
2) the Fophia girl is shown at beginning of movie also which is supposed to be a recurrent Fahid Kapoor dream throughout the film.The film is too dark to have a happy ending.

Anyways all the above crap is not my brainchild , I read a similar thing about the cult De Niro film – Taxi Driver , where the happy ending shown in the end is suspected as being his dying thoughts by certain film geeks.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver#Interpretations_of_the_ending)

Just because has made interesting work in the past doesn’t mean this film is special. Let’s see it for what it is: a ripoff, just like sanjay gupta, but done with more style and flourish and lot of hand-held camerawork to cover up a lousy script. We’ll leave Shahid’s blow-dried hair for another post…

I loved the Mikhail-Charlie physical dosti. It creates a lot of tension, for some it sows doubts of homo eroticism, but I thought that captured how some Indians express emotions. I know many people who are like that in India. Trivial homophobia and calling out no-homo is a very western/urban India sentiment.

“the Bangali Dadas who have some of the best lines of the movie, that too in Bangla.”

specially when they didnt utter more than 10 words in the whole movie.
Otherwise, the review is nicely written.