No doubt tired of being continually typecast in roles as arm-candy to male action-stars almost 20 years her senior, including Salman Khan, Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar, for the majority of her now six-year Bollywood career, Sonakshi Sinha appears to have finally decided to limber up and throw a few punches at that desi-babe-with-a-heart-of-gold image with the new Akira. Directed by AR Murugadoss, the film is a remake of the 2011 Tamil feature Mouna Guru, whose director, Santha Kumar, has been listed as a “co-writer” here along with Murugadoss. But while there’s little question that Bollywood could do with more women-led projects with women-centred narratives, Akira unfortunately finds itself at the lower end of that spectrum, having neatly replaced the male protagonist in the original with a female one and called it a day.

Obviously, it’s never as simple as that, and the fact that Murugadoss just plain neglects to deal with the varied complexities in perspective and experience that would have come of such a significant switch renders the brand of “feminism” the film flaunts rather hollow. There are a few impressive performances slotted in, and certainly some moments of genuine intrigue, but overall, an anaemic script means that Akira fails at its core mission of dismantling the norms of a genre disproportionately dominated by men in Bollywood: it comes off more as a token, gimmicky nod to gender parity rather than a genuine effort.

Part of the problem is the insipid backstory our titular heroine is equipped with: As a little girl growing up in Jodhpur, Akira (Mishiekka Arora) witnesses a horrific acid attack on a young woman by some local rowdies. Akira’s father (Atul Kulkarni), a teacher at a school for deaf and mute children, and the sort of saintly figure that can only exist in flashbacks, decides to pull her out of Kathak and enrol her in some self-defense martial-arts classes. One training montage later, and she’s somehow turned into an indestructible fighting machine—within the span of just a few months from what I can gather. And in what is probably the Best Parenting Decision of the Year, the father is so confident in Akira’s skills that he encourages her to pick a fight with the acid-throwers. Though she manages to give them a taste of their own disfiguring medicine, she is promptly sent to juvy for a few years. Good doing, dad.

In the present, a grown-up Akira (now played by Sinha) is making the reluctant move to Mumbai to attend college, but trouble follows her like a bad smell. Not only is she hassled by a group of classmates, who—despite a clear aversion to academia—appear to have read and memorised the Big Book of Bully Tropes, but she also, by some unfortunate twist of circumstances, falls into the bad books of a powerful and corrupt cop, the ACP Govind Rane (Anurag Kashyap, hamming it up all the way). What follows is a convoluted, and not entirely satisfactory, slog towards justice, where Akira is continually waylaid by Rane and his cronies, beaten, bruised, even placed in a mental asylum at one point, and where each step forward will test her body and mind, and will require every ounce of her instincts for self-preservation.

We’ve seen Sinha’s acting chops on display in previous stints, most notably 2013’s Lootera, and she does have a certain gravitas about her here. But while on one hand, she’s strait jacketed by a severely underwritten role that allows her to do little else but brood—her face is drawn into a perpetual frown and she doesn’t have too many lines—on the other, she isn’t at all convincing in the fight sequences, scenes that should’ve been, by all means, the highlight of a film like this, but which here lack both fluidity and thrill. Indeed, that’s one of Akira’s biggest let-downs: despite giving off a very Kill-Bill sort of vibe in terms of premise, where that series had showcased some inspired action choreography, there’s a very predictable, repetitious quality to such confrontations in this film.

Akira boasts a fairly expansive rest-of-the-cast, but performances are unremarkable on average. Excepting, that is, one Mr Anurag Kashyap who is just about pitch-perfect as the unhinged Rane, oozing the right amount of filth and flippancy, and having a blooming great time by the looks of it. His is the only character in the film that is actually interesting; so little effort has gone into fleshing out any of the numerous others onscreen that it’s not surprising most fail to register. Akira’s plotting suffers much the same fate as its characters—poorly-conceived and entirely unconvincing, the narrative arc is perched upon a series of weak contrivances and serendipitous turns that just don’t fly, whether it’s a  walkie-talkie that goes out of whack just when our kidnapped heroine needs a bit of time to escape or an otherwise disoriented psychiatric inmate who turns out to have excellent coordination, and driving skills, when required.

Most unfortunate, however, is the female-empowerment angle that the film so smugly believes it has down pat. Though there is a certain pleasure in watching Akira kick butt, the fact that her mythology is so shoddily-constructed—it’s never really explained how she got her skills (I’m sorry, but that one martial-arts class in school is not going to cut it) and became nearly invincible—making the “lesson” that Murugadoss plates out, that all women strive to be like his heroine, a tad confusing. Of course, the director has taken his cue from the Singhams and Rowdy Rathores, featuring larger-than-life supermen doling out justice with their fists, and they were certainly not designed to be emulated, but those films didn’t take themselves anywhere nearly as seriously as Akira does (a cop-out towards the end is particularly frustrating).

And that’s my biggest grievance here: the film needed to either have been lighter, funnier, embracing the absurdity of a one-man/woman army, or alternately, if it truly wished to Make a Statement, ditched the premise for one that more realistically addressed issues affecting women, rather than simply skimming over them perfunctorily. It doesn’t do to just plonk Sinha in the driver’s seat if the director isn’t willing to go beyond the fact that she somehow has the strength of many men. That’s not enough.