Shahid Kapoor takes the movie and tries to run with it. But he has been a hero at the centre-stage for too long; his responses are too practiced, too familiar. He feels too old for this role.

This Shahid Kapoor film is perhaps the most misogynistic Indian film in a long time — the hero is a bully, an abuser of women, an insensitive lout, an alcoholic surgeon, and a foulmouthed hothead.

From treating women like toys, trampling all over their feelings and then acting like a wounded martyr and misunderstood genius wronged by the world, Kabir Singh rounds up every foolish male’s ultimate fantasy.

Lack of rules can be refreshing, but to watch a sicko getting away after ticking every wrong in the book just rankles.

Shahid stretches himself very thin trying to convince us that Kabir Singh is a present-day incarnation of Devdas.

Kabir Singh spends 120 minutes of its 154 in showing Kabir either drinking or drunk or snorting cocaine or needling in morphine or fighting with people or, slapping his girlfriend or screaming at her. Or making out. In the remaining 24 minutes, his repentance is done with, and we all go home with a happy ending. If you think it is okay, if you think it is justified because ‘movie hai yaar, it’s not real life’, you are part of the problem.

Kabir Singh and its Telugu forebear Arjun Reddy must rank among the most disturbing examples of the obsessive stalker hero being glamourised by Indian cinema.

This Shahid Kapoor, Kiara Advani adaptation of Arjun Reddy could have been 40 minutes shorter

The 174-minute film might appeal to the multiplex-going young audience but it could have been pruned by a discernible editor at least by half-an-hour to make it a racier love story, without harming the flawed character of the hypertensive Devdas of our times.