Akira [dir. AR Murgadoss]

Simply by not having an extended flashback with an excruciating romance-meets-odious-comedy track, Akira (no relation to Katsuhiro Otomo's classic anime) is 200% better than most Murga-dross movies. Add to it an absence of tedious fantasy song sequences in bad fashion scapes and you have to wonder if the director had one of those "blow on the head that changes your life" moments his protagonists are subject to.

Akira is the official remake of a Tamil film Mouna Guru (which had a male protagonist, and according to Baradwaj Rangan, was a much better film). As Rangan perhaps rightly points out, a woman-centric action film feels obliged to point out why its lead is so quick to sock people. So in a preamble, Akira as a child is witness to an acid attack. For who-knows-what reason the victim's parents appear to have invited the entire neighborhood to witness the unveiling of her bandages, like it was a fucking award ceremony. Akira's Masterji father (Atul Kulkarni in a where's-my-paycheck part) then pushes her into a karate class, oh-so-meaningfully bypassing the adjoining dance class, and almost immediately after, a confrontation with the acid-hurling goons, which lands her a 3-year remand home sentence for causing one of them to splash himself with the corrosive after-shave. One would think the cops should arrest Akira's father for forcing his progeny into an acutely risky vigilante situation, but in Murugadoss' world this qualifies as awesome parenting.

Thus Akira (Sonakshi Sinha) grows up to be a Shiva, with breasts instead of a mustache - She is by nature reserved and taciturn, but ready to take panga with anyone that crosses her; This isn't layered writing, but you don't need more detail for this sort of film. Anyhoo, by a convoluted sequence of circumstances, our heroine gets mixed up with a posse of not-so-bright, not-so-upright cops (led by a cheerfully sleazy Anurag Kashyap) that stole a large bag of cash from an accident victim. To save their own skins they have her framed as a violent delusional and sent to an asylum that rivals the one in Amitabh Bachchan's Yaarana for WTF-ery. You know how it goes from here - Akira-gal must escape from the asylum and flush out her tormentors for justice. This happens with remarkable facility, and there's a last-minute twist that's more difficult to swallow.

Akira doesn't have the sleight-of-hand of say, an Ek Hasina Thi, but trots at a brisk clip without much in the way of stopping to smell the roses. Unlike Rani Mukherjee's forced mardaangi in Mardaani, Sonakshi slips into the character with ease. Given the space, she has an understated charisma and strong instincts as an actor, and effectively conveys Akira's tough-tender nature. It's unfortunate then that Murgadoss shoots the action in a manner that undermines her - lazy choreography, quick cuts and multiple angles don't help to sell the illusion of the badass heroine, and too much seems to have been left to stunt doubles (The brief  'making of' snippets on the DVD show Sonakshi doing multiple kicks-in-the-air, but in the film it's unnecessarily chopped up).