There is a specific kind of physical distress reserved for watching a leading man swallow live goldfish on screen, and if I'm honest, Shankar’s "I" delivers that exact feeling within its first forty-five minutes with a commitment that borders on alarming. Vikram didn't just lose weight for the role of Lingesan, a state-level bodybuilder turned deformed outcast; he apparently dissolved his muscle mass down to skin and structural bone while the cameras rolled in China, sweating under heavy prosthetics that took seven hours to apply every morning. We are so used to seeing stars in Hindi films wear a bit of soot on their cheek or slouch slightly to indicate hardship that watching an actual human actor transform into an unrecognizable, hunchbacked creature with weeping skin lesions feels jarringly intense.

Shankar has always operated on a scale that makes standard blockbusters look like student films, but his screenplay here feels stitched together from three different genres that refuse to hold hands. Lingesan starts as a gym rat obsessed with an elite model named Diya played by Amy Jackson, who has the striking visual presence of a porcelain doll combined with line deliveries that occasionally land with the emotional resonance of a reading from a phone manual. The narrative shifts abruptly from a standard-issue underdog romance into a high-gloss fashion industry satire before violently careening into a revenge thriller involving a deformed vigilante who hunts down his tormentors using various bizarre methods, including a swarm of genetically altered bees. It’s a lot to process, mostly because the transition points between these tonal gears are non-existent, leaving the audience to violently jerk forward every time the plot remembers it has a new grievance to air.

Vikram carries this unwieldy machine entirely on his emaciated shoulders, managing to make both the vain, slick-haired hunk of the first act and the tragic, slurring hunchback of the third act feel like the same desperate soul. When he breaks down weeping in front of a mirror after seeing his ruined face for the first time, the scene works despite the melodramatic trap doors Shankar leaves open all around him. Upen Patel plays the primary antagonist with the blank-eyed villainy of someone who wandered off a runway and accidentally stumbled onto a set where people were throwing real punches. His dubbing is slightly out of sync in a couple of crucial confrontation scenes, and it’s a small thing, but it bugged me every time his mouth kept moving two frames after the audio track had already decided to stop.

P.C. Sreeram’s cinematography refuses to let you look away from the excess, painting the Shanghai sequences with a neon-drenched gloss that makes every commercial shoot look like an expensive music video. Then, the visual palette curdles into something greasy and claustrophobic once the revenge plot kicks in, matching Lingesan’s internal decay with rotting greens and bruised purples. A.R. Rahman’s soundtrack features tracks that blare through the speakers with aggressive percussion, though the song placement often arrives with the subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window, halting the narrative momentum just as the movie was starting to gather some real speed. You get massive dance numbers featuring hundreds of extras in elaborate tribal gear, and then ten minutes later, the film plunges into a grimy alleyway where someone is getting their spine adjusted by an angry hunchback.

The underlying themes about the tyranny of physical perfection and the superficial cruelty of the fashion world feel genuinely angry, even if Shankar can't resist undercutting his own points with cheap slapstick involving Santhanam playing the mandatory sidekick whose main job is to make fun of people with physical differences. It creates a strange cognitive dissonance where the movie condemns society for mocking disability while simultaneously using said disability as a punchline during the comic relief segments. This tonal schizophrenia reminds me of Kamal Haasan’s "Indian," where heavy social commentary and cartoonish brutality share the exact same frame without ever quite figuring out how to speak to each other. You sit there watching a man with severe hunchback posture weep over a billboard, and five minutes earlier, he was throwing a villain into a vat of industrial hair removal cream.

By the time the sprawling runtime stumbles toward its bloated conclusion, the exhaustion in the auditorium matches the exhaustion on Vikram’s face. The villains are dispatched with increasingly elaborate cruelty, and Diya finally understands the depth of the tragedy that befell the man who loved her before she was famous, though the emotional payoff is drowned out by yet another explosion of CGI bees and tumbling scaffolding. It isn't a tight thriller, and it certainly isn't a disciplined drama, preferring instead to throw every single idea, costume, and prosthetic limb it can afford against the wall until something sticks. Lingesan’s final fate isn't heroic or tragic in any traditional sense, leaving him to wander off into the distance like a ghost from a different, better movie that got lost inside this one.