Can Mardaani 2 claim to be a feminist film? Let's see what it does. It's great to see Rani Mukerji (fit, in command) playing the shero—Shivani Shivaji Roy, Superintendent of Police (SP), Kota, Rajasthan, fighting crimes against women. The film, directed by Gopi Puthran, is a taut howdunit. Roy has 48 hours to catch a serial rapist and murderer, who is causing misogynist mayhem. The crimes are grisly, even cannibalist, with strangulation marks, weals all over, bruised private parts, even the victim's cheek bitten off, before hanging the body from a rope or dumping it in a pond. A sequel to Pradeep Sarkar's Mardaani, written by Puthran in 2014, this is hardly a whodunit. Puthran does a Hitchcock: both the audience and Roy know who the criminal is early on (you see flashes in the trailer; opening credits speak of juvenile rape offenders and there's only one main juvenile, Sunny, ie Vishal Jethwa, playing a creepy smarta**), so no suspense who.

The film, produced by Aditya Chopra, head of Yash Raj Films and Mukerji's husband, remains taut despite this. The opening credits tell us 2,000 rape crimes are committed by juveniles below 18 years in India every year, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. For an entire film centering around a juvenile offender, the film neither explores why the juvenile turns into a psychotic rapist and murderer, nor the legal challenges of convicting one. There's a dheela reference about a family murder in childhood—but we don't know why he was involved, nor how this created a sex-crazed monster. There's an interesting track about Sunny doing it for fame and to taunt Roy via the media, not so much as personal revenge against the victims.