Critics’ Verdict: ‘Jab Harry Met Sejal’ Is a Missed Opportunity

Check out how the critics are reacting to Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma’s ‘Jab Harry Met Sejal’.

Film: Jab Harry Met Sejal
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma

Excerpts from reviews of Jab Harry Met Sejal:

What we get is a trip through beautiful European spots, and Harry and Sejal trying to find what they are looking for. The ring is, of course, just a metaphor. Both are, of course, searching for the other. What you need in such films with their flimsy one-line plots, is the magic and mystery of love between two people. And full-blown wonder. All in short supply in Jab Harry Met Sejal, which comes off as a mix of Ali’s older films, in its flashes of Jab We Met, Tamasha and Love Aaj Kal. It comes down to counting the momentary pleasures of this disappointing film: a bit of the sparring between Harry and Sejal, the breathless awareness that the other exists, and the realization that without the other, it’s simply not worth it. 

Shubhra Gupta (The Indian Express)

Harry and Sejal talk, talk, talk and talk their heads off especially in the indoor scenes, as if they were elocuting lines for a stage play. Since the story is not at all the key factor, a bid’s on to convince you that there can be a role reversal. The ‘bad character’ can turn over a new tree, and the prissy Ms Sejal can metamorphose into a bold butterfly. Elementary lesson this, with token nods to the old-fashioned notion: don’t just jump into bed, guys. That sort of sanctimonious stuff. Huff. Like it or not, Imtiaz Ali seems to be in a retro-moralistic mode. No interiors of the mind and heart explored here, in contrast to the incisive passages evidenced in his Jab We Met, Rockstar and Tamasha. A pity.

Khalid Mohamed (SpotBoyE)

It is hard to believe that the man who made such thinking entertainers as Jab We Met and Tamasha has created this boring film. Worse, through Sejal’s teasing ways, her stupidity and a troubling conversation she has with Harry’s ex-girlfriend Clara in Frankfurt, Ali seems to be quietly making a rather disturbing point about the meaning of consent in sexual relations, women who — as the prejudice goes — ‘ask for it’, women who cry rape after ‘asking for it’ and so on. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise considering that, although some of his heroines have been strong women, the writer-director did, after all, come up with a very problematic man-woman equation in Rockstar, and has casually featured rape jokes in both Rockstar and Jab We Met. Jab Harry Met Sejal gets more exasperating with each passing minute. There is a fantastic Indian word for pretentious art of this kind: pakau.

Anna Vetticad (FirstPost)

First half: breezy but unabashedly banal. Second half: riddled with toe-curling romantic mush. Sum total: a journey without maps that weaves concentric circles around sweet nothings and empty prittle-prattle. That, in a nutshell, is Imtiaz Ali’s perambulatory rom com Jab Harry Met Sejal. It leaves you wishing they hadn’t met. To be sure, Jab Harry Met Sejal possesses the unfettered, Sufi spirit of Ali’s previous free-wheeling explorations of love and longing. It, however, lacks the flashes of ideational, experiential and tonal originality that livened up parts of those earlier films. 

Saibal Chatterjee (NDTV)

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