Shankar balances a social critique along with technical gimmickry and here the message centres about our obsession with physical perfection and beauty. Vikram’s transformation from a man in prime physical shape to a boil-covered hunchback is truly grotesque, as are the rest of the changes in the film. The big bugbear for the film remains its run time of 3 hours and ten minutes. Hopefully, the technical wizardry will be enough to make the audience forgive this lapse …

I is too long, too stupid and too regressive to be entertaining. If you’re determined to watch it, make sure you see the Tamil original and not the awkward, Hindi-dubbed version, regardless of whether or not you understand Tamil. It’s a little longer than the Hindi, but infinitely more fun, especially if you’re with Shankar and/or Vikram fans. The wiser option, however, would be to wait for someone to put I’s best moments on YouTube.

I has the merits to entertain. It may have started slow but it will pick up due to positive word of mouth and end up doing fair business in the final tally.

A story this pulpy should have been way more exciting.

In more than half a decade of Tamil movie industry it has always been observed that the weight of expectations vested on a movie is directly proportional to the disenchantment of the average movie-watching public. But ‘I’ breaks this trend majestically. ‘I’ is definitely not the best script among Shankar’s films but the average script is lifted by the extraordinary performance of Vikram & impressive technical wizardry.