Madhav Jha wears a checked shirt in almost every single scene set in Delhi University, which feels less like a character choice and more like the costume department bought a bulk pack of ten from a discount warehouse and refused to open any other boxes. That checked shirt is practically a co-star by the time the interval hits, absorbing rain, tears, and a whole lot of dialogue about the English language. Mohit Suri directs this adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s novel with the exact same visual register he brought to Aashiqui 2, which means every time the two leads have a serious conversation on a balcony, the atmosphere is saturated in a moody blue grade that suggests it is perpetually five minutes before a thunderstorm.

Arjun Kapoor plays Madhav, a basketball-playing boy from rural Bihar who struggles with urban English and even more with modern romance, and if I'm honest, his performance requires a lot of patience from the audience. He spends the first half of the running time hunching his shoulders and looking at the floor as if he expects someone to drop a heavy dictionary on his head, which is fair enough given the script keeps hammering the point that he belongs to the vernacular medium while Rhea Chakraborty’s character and her friends glide through St. Stephen’s College speaking fluent RP. When he finally gets angry and starts shouting about how English shouldn't be the only measure of a man's worth, the sheer volume of it drowns out whatever actual social observation the scene was aiming for. He lacks that effortless charm that makes you forgive a protagonist for being dense for two hours and forty minutes, leaving you to just sit there watching him circle the same emotional drainage pipe.

Shraddha Kapoor plays Riya Somani, a wealthy girl who sings at open-mics and agrees to be Madhav's half-girlfriend because she doesn't want to commit to a full relationship, and her character is written with such baffling shifts in motivation that you start to wonder if pages were simply missing from the bound script handed to the actors on the first day of shooting. One minute she is running away from a wedding in a heavily embroidered lehenga to hide in a dusty railway station, and the next she is popping up in New York City with a guitar and a completely different haircut, singing acoustic covers while wearing a leather jacket that costs more than Madhav's entire college tuition. It’s a very strange kind of writing where the female lead exists entirely as a symbol of unattainable urban sophistication for the small-town boy to chase across multiple continents.

The screenplay by Tushar Hiranandani feels like it was put together by someone who read a summary of a college romance on the back of a bus ticket and tried to stretch it out into an epic saga about identity and class anxiety. There is a running subplot about Madhav trying to get corporate funding from a wealthy philanthropist played by Vikrant Massey for his village school, and every time the film cuts back to this mission, the pacing grinds down to a complete halt because nobody involved seems to care about school infrastructure as much as they care about whether Riya is going to answer her phone. The dialogue relies heavily on repetitive declarations about self-respect and half-relationships, using the exact same phrasing three or four times in a single conversation just in case anyone in the back row was checking their phone and missed the metaphor.

Cinematographer Vishnu Rao points his camera at Delhi and New York with a sort of glossy indifference, capturing every street corner and café with the sterile polish of a real estate brochure rather than a living, breathing space. Whenever the narrative gets stuck, the soundtrack steps in with another soaring romantic ballad composed by a committee of musicians, and while some of these songs are catchy enough on the radio, hearing the exact same piano riff swell up during every single emotional realization starts to grate on the nerves long before the credits roll. There is a supporting actor who plays Madhav's loyal roommate from Bihar, and his voice-dubbing is so egregiously out of sync in a couple of park scenes that you can finish entire sentences in your head before his lips even start moving on the screen.

Hindi cinema has a long and somewhat storied tradition of exploring the painful gulf between elite urban privilege and small-town aspiration, a dynamic handled with far more nuance in a film like Jab We Met where the cultural friction actually fueled the comedy and the character growth instead of just causing endless tears on park benches. Here, the socio-economic commentary rarely rises above the level of a billboard, telling us repeatedly that English is a status symbol while simultaneously using glossy aesthetic choices that worship the very lifestyle it claims to be critiquing. Madhav's obsession with Riya becomes less of a compelling romance and more of an endurance test, watching a grown man refuse to move on with his life because a girl once told him she liked him a lot but not enough to hold hands in public.

By the time the narrative stumbles its way into a needlessly complicated medical subplot in New York involving terminal illness and secret phone calls, the emotional goodwill of the audience has long since been exhausted by the sheer repetitiveness of the arguments. Arjun Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor try their absolute best to sell the grand reconciliation at a basketball court, but the staging is so stiff and the outcome so entirely predictable that it plays out like a commercial for an athletic brand rather than a hard-won romantic payoff. It's a loud, glossy, and aggressively mediocre piece of work that leaves very little impression once the screen goes dark, failing both as a campus romance and as a serious look at linguistic insecurity in contemporary life.