In terms of a pure action movie, I think Kill might just be the best to have been released from India. And India has its fair share of action classics, but given the nature of a lot of mainstream South Asian cinema, which tends to incorporate multiple genres, the idea of putting out a very stripped down, straightforward, and void of any musical numbers genre exercise is not a common thing to find. Kill is a Hindi language film, but it’s a far cry from your usual Bollywood fare, despite Karan Johar being listed as a producer, putting it closer to its inspirations like The Raid, a similarly structured single location action film.
Written and directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, the premise is very simple. An army commando named Amrit (Lakshya) is on a train hoping to elope with the love of his life, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), who is being engaged to someone else against her wishes. Unfortunately, a gang of bandits led by the elder Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi) and his ruthless son Fani (Raghav Juyal), are also on the train, and they begin to wreak havoc. In an effort to save the people on the train, as well as Tulika’s younger sister, who went to a bathroom in a different section of the train right as the chaos ensued, Amrit and his army buddy Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), fight their way through the small army of thieves.
For about the first half of the film, I felt that it was quite good, but nothing really special. It has a pretty standard setup, the romance is a bit on the corny side, and Lakshya, a relative newcomer only known for TV roles up to this point, is a touch stilted in some of the more romantic and dramatic beats. But he does know how to handle himself in the action, his own personal martial arts experience really comes in handy. However, once the title drops at the 45 minute mark, it’s like the film gets cranked to 11, and the remainder of the film is a breathless and brutal onslaught of blood, guts, and carnage, the likes of which we rarely get to see outside of outliers in the action genre like The Night Comes For Us, which brings slasher level violence into the action sphere.
Oh Se-yeong and Parvez Shaikh worked together designing the action for this film, and it’s truly remarkable. We are stuck in the train for pretty much the entire film, and they manage to prevent the fights from feeling repetitive. Almost every fight incorporates some new dynamic. It can start with a tight hallways brawl. OK, now let’s pull them into one of the seating areas. OK, now let’s go into another seating area, but now there’s passengers inside. OK, now let’s bring the action to the bathroom. OK, now let’s have some of the passengers include themselves into the action. And so on and so forth, you get the picture. It smartly utilizes the notoriously tight corridors of the train for maximum impact and suspense.
Indian action cinema, especially on a mainstream level, tends to have heroes who are these unstoppable machines, who easily go through dozens of henchmen, and even if they take a hit here and there, there really isn’t a question that they will win in the end. Here, Amrit spends quite a bit getting brutalized with so much bashing and stabbings, he gets captured, and when he does go into full unstoppable beast mode, it is incredibly satisfying. At first, at least. Then it turns horrifying because the violence he inflicts upon the villains here is so brutal, you almost start to feel bad for the gang, whom we see openly mourn their losses, sobbing as they lose their family members in their continuous encounters with Amrit. Fani even says to Amrit during a third act stand-off, reeking of desperation and horror, “who kills like this, man?”
Kill is most definitely a new landmark in Indian cinema, delivering on a style of action filmmaking that easily competes with the very best that other world cinema has to offer. While it does have a simple premise, with minimal gestures toward class and caste in its subtext, it is mainly a vessel to deliver non-stop thrills and heart-pumping action. I don’t necessarily want to compare these movies, but this movie gave me the experience that I wanted to see in Monkey Man. That animalistic, very guttural, lizard brain viciousness with its violence was much better executed here, and I ultimately think the subtle nods towards the divide between the heroes and villains here, was much more interesting and provocative than anything in Monkey Man as well. I loved this movie, I had an absolute blast watching it, and I would not hesitate to recommend this to just about anybody, assuming you have the stomach for some of the stuff that happens here.
Kill is now playing in theaters.
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