Starring Devika Bhise. In English, Hindi, and Marathi, with English subtitles. Rated PG

It’s rare to complain about an Indian film being too short, but The Warrior Queen of Jhansi definitely feels like every third scene is missing. The tale of Rani Lakshmi Bai, who led a rebellion against British colonial rule in 1857, deserves to be told more fulsomely than this costume-and-talk–heavy drama can muster, despite the presence of big names and a widescreen panorama.

Back then, the Indian subcontinent was ruled not by Britannia but indirectly, by the British East India Company. Students of Canadian history can easily relate to this, while clutching their Hudson’s Bay blankets and contemplating the merger between today’s corporations and the underfunded, overcompromised governments expected to regulate them.

In this female-centred action movie, Queen Victoria (Jodhi May) is seen as a mitigating force unable to dampen the avarice represented by the company’s Lord Palmerston (Derek Jacobi), who thinks only of the bottom line.

“We owe these vulgar natives nothing,” says one of his shareholders, encapsulating the arrogance, racism, and inability to recognize other realities that would eventually doom the empire—as well as even the rump state it would become in the Brexit era.

Here, the Great White Father’s sense of order is threatened by various rebel forces, some of whom unite behind the real-life queen who uses her education and martial skills to mount a fierce campaign against the redcoats, ever ready to back the English ka-ching machine.

Our warrior queen is played by young Devika Bhise, who also cowrote the highly expository script with her mother, Swati Bhise, a Mumbai-born choreographer, based in New York, making her feature debut with this hugely ambitious artifact. She is notably clever at massing the larger scenes, with women learning the art of war and then practising it in the eventual showdown with the British army, led by a hammy Rupert Everett, whose huge mutton-chop whiskers offer him plausible deniability. (“She’s like Joan of Arc,” he says helpfully, during their climactic battle.)

Unfortunately, the tale is too stiff, abbreviated, and confusingly edited to make for the gripping stuff it was meant to be. By the way, a 1953 version of this story, Jhansi Ki Rani, was India’s first Technicolor movie. It bombed at the box-office. Now here’s hoping renewed interest in the anticolonial Wonder Woman at its centre will ensure that it keeps getting told.