I didn’t actually believe that this would really turn out to be a comedy action movie but I suppose I really should have believed in the poster and all of the clues. It’s so weird watching this after Ms. Marvel because it’s doing so many of the same things and even has the same actress playing the villain despite not having any superpowers involved. In some ways, it’s even better since having people with superpowers resort to fisticuffs in the end always looked dumb. There are some points in this film where it crosses the line over into cringe territory but I’d say it’s a decent action movie in the growing girl power genre.

British-Pakistani teenager Ria Khan dreams of being a stuntwoman while her sister Lena aspires to be an artist. She doesn’t get much success with her videos on social media however and her emails to her idol, the famous stunt performer Eunice Huthart, goes unanswered. When Lena drops out of art school and considers an arranged marriage instead, Ria becomes upset. The two sisters are invited to an Eid soirée hosted by a rich family where Lena is introduced to Salim, a good looking doctor with a background in genetics. When Lena starts to date Salim, Ria tries to sabotage their relationship with the help of her friends from school. She plans and executes elaborate plans to steal his laptop to search for incriminating information and even tries to plant false evidence when his record comes back as being clean. One day while being forced to join Salim’s mother for a spa day, she stumbles across a secret laboratory inside their mansion with records of the mother and son having done tests on all of the women who attended the soirée. She must somehow foil their plans before Salim takes Lena away from her to Singapore after their marriage.

This film leans less away from enriching cultural exchange and way more towards kickass action than Ms. Marvel. It even has the anime-style trope where the protagonist keeps practicing that one special move complete with a cheesy line of dialogue that she keeps failing at so you already know she’ll only get it right at the pivotal moment. I don’t really like the sense of humor here but it’s amusing how Ria’s world runs according to comic book logic so everything is resolved through fisticuffs and everyone is amazingly tolerant of property damage. Ria and Lena tear through their bedrooms and rip down the doors of their house as their argument devolves to violence and it’s all good as far as their parents are concerned. The evil plot is of course totally insane and implausible too but the craziness is all part of the fun. We can’t help but notice that the characters are all Pakistani Muslims what with the clothing, dialogue, marriage arrangements and the obligatory dance, but the details are incidental. It’s a lighthearted action movie about characters who happen to be Pakistani Muslims and not at all a film about their community in general and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

The fight choreography is okay, more showy than realistic, which works well enough for what they’re doing. How this fits into British society is downright weird but in a good way. When they have fights in the school for example, they are threatened with a loss of house points. Is this a reference to Harry Potter or is this something that really happens in British private schools? I suspect it’s both and that’s vaguely amusing. It wears plenty of other cinematic influences on its sleeve, everything from Quentin Tarantino to Yuen Woo Ping. In the hands of a more established auteur, it might have been able to forge a more distinctive identity of its own but I’d say that this is fine work as the feature film debut of its director Nida Manzoor.

It’s still a fairly shallow action movie and sillier than I’d hoped it would be. It’s not a film that going to win any awards and it probably won’t be remembered years from now but it makes for acceptable entertainment and isn’t far off from the much more expensive MCU films in that regard.