Somewhere deep inside Luka Chuppi is the film it wanted to be: a send-up of the tiresome rituals and hypocrisies which bind socially-sanctioned relationships, and an attack on religious bigotry.

The only people who prevent you from strangling yourself is the forever-bickering couple played by Anil Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit.

…this is a film to enjoy, both in the seeing, and in the hearing: the soundtrack and the ‘songs’ leap off the screen. In today’s India, to bring a Murad and Safeena, their Muslim-ness a matter-of-fact statement, into centre-stage, to give traction to those who live on the wrong side of the tracks, is an act of bravery. I’ll take them any day over an overused Raj-and-Raveena. ‘Inka time aa gaya’. Rap along.

What it comes down to is this: yes, we want to make a progressive film, but we have to show our women getting freed up only after getting male approval-and-help.

As promised, Manikarnika does tick all the nationalistic boxes. It is getting a perfectly-timed Republic Day release. And there are plenty of eye-roll moments as it chases the red-faced Brits, and raises the flag. It may have been Jhansi, but it is clearly a prelude to the ‘tiranga’. But what keeps us with the film is Rani Ranaut, who in her best moments, owns her part, the narrative, and the screen.

Almost every moment in the movie is a death of irony, the biggest of them being that Nawazuddin Siddiqui, an outsider on both counts of community and religion, plays Balasaheb Thackeray.

The material is slender and too stretched over two hours, as it goes from engineering-medicine into management, the holy grail.

The film is an out-an-out propaganda film, created for the specific purpose of making the former prime minister look like a weak, spineless man, a puppet whose strings were controlled by The Family.

The movie on the whole keeps you watching despite some clunky passages. It’s always good to have movies in which the soldiers look real, even if the action is buoyed by such dialogues as ‘unhe Kashmir chaihye, humein unka sar’.

Emily Blunt is good, as are the children, and the rest of the performers do their job well enough. A couple of the sequences, when Blunt lets herself go, as well as the climactic set-piece, is quite lovely.