Shah Rukh Khan keeps pulling on the collar of his suit jacket like he forgot how to breathe in public. It is a small tic, maybe improvised, maybe just him trying to inject some actual oxygen into a three-hour melodrama that threatens to drown in its own production design. Karan Johar made Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna in 2006, when Hindi movies were still figuring out how to let their heroes be messy, petty, and actively unlikable without losing the audience at the intermission. He stacked the deck with Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Rani Mukherjee, and Preity Zinta, then shoved them all into a snow-dusted New York that looks remarkably like Toronto on a tax break. The result is a sprawling, exhausting, frequently brilliant mess that I still think about whenever someone tells me mainstream cinema has to be morally hygienic.

The screenplay is structurally lopsided, moving with the sluggish grace of a heavily laden freighter trying to parallel park on Madison Avenue. Johar wants to dismantle the sanctity of the arranged marriage while simultaneously bathing every emotional beat in the warm, golden glow of a Yash Raj backlot, which creates a strange friction. Dev is a bitter, sidelined soccer player whose career ended with a bad tackle, and Maya is an orphan who walked down the aisle because it felt like the responsible thing to do, and both of them are utterly insufferable to their respective spouses. If I'm honest, Dev's perpetual scowl gets exhausting about twenty minutes after he enters the frame, a brooding weight that makes you want to hand him a chamomile tea and tell him to call his therapist. The dialogue swings wildly between piercingly observant domestic combat and the kind of high-gloss platitudes that sound like they were workshopped by a focus group of wedding planners.

Then you have Amitabh Bachchan playing Samarjit Singh, known universally as Sexy Sam, marching around in ascots and leather coats with a swagger that borders on the cartoonish. He steals every scene he is in simply by refusing to inhabit the same emotional universe as anyone else in the room. Abhishek Bachchan, playing his son Rishi, fares a bit worse under the weight of a character written primarily as a human golden retriever who dances too much at fashion shows. Preity Zinta plays Rhea as a high-powered fashion editor whose emotional vulnerability is signaled entirely by her habit of wearing oversized scarves indoors, which is a styling choice that bugged me from her very first scene. Rani Mukherjee has the hardest job, playing a woman who knows she is ruining four lives and cannot stop herself from watching the clock tick toward disaster. There is a sequence in a train station where her face goes completely blank just as the reality of the affair settles into her bones, and for a few seconds, the glossy sheen of the direction actually cracks open to reveal something raw and jagged.

The visual language relies heavily on crane shots that sweep over Central Park like the director is trying to prove he has enough budget to rent a helicopter for a Tuesday afternoon. Anil Mehta's cinematography prefers stark primary colors, dressing Dev in mournful charcoal and Maya in muted earthy tones until they are forced into the same frame, at which point the lighting gets so aggressively romantic you feel like you are wearing sunglasses indoors. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's soundtrack remains the anchor holding the entire enterprise together, though the title track gets recycled as a background instrumental about six times too many, bleeding into scenes where silence would have done a much better job. That repetition of the main theme starts to feel like a crutch, leaning on the audience's Pavlovian response to a soaring string section whenever someone looks mournfully out a frosted window.

Dev and Maya meet because they are both miserable in ways that feel intensely specific to urban professionals who thought success would taste like champagne instead of tap water. They are terrible to each other, and they are worse to the people who love them, which separates this from standard romantic fare where adultery is framed as a glorious rebellion against conservative values. When you watch this alongside something like Dil Chahta Hai, you can see the exact moment the industry tried to grow up and discovered that maturity is messier than writing clever banter. The film refuses to provide easy absolution, leaving its central couple stranded in a moral gray zone that made conservative audiences in Mumbai squirm and overseas distributors nervous.

There are long stretches where the pacing completely collapses under the sheer weight of its own runtime, particularly during the second-act wedding sequences that drag on long after the narrative momentum has packed its bags. You can feel the sweat dripping from the edit bay as they try to transition from broad, slapstick family comedy involving Amitabh's character flirting with younger women into devastating marital dissolution without giving the viewer whiplash. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it feels like watching two entirely different films spliced together by someone who lost the original script notes. The supporting cast floats in and out of the narrative like ghosts, occasionally dropping a piece of wisdom before vanishing back into the party chatter.

What keeps the whole thing from sinking into pure soap opera is the sheer audacity of its central premise, which suggests that sometimes love isn't enough to save a marriage, and sometimes leaving is the only honest thing left to do. It is a cynical pill to swallow for an audience raised on eternal devotion and three-hour reconciliations under a monsoon sky. Johar doesn't offer a clean resolution, even at the end, choosing instead to let the characters live in the rubble of their own choices. Nobody gets off easy, and the credits roll while everyone is still trying to figure out how to put their lives back together without a net. It is messy, it is occasionally brilliant, and it refuses to apologize for being too much.