“Kill” by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat wanna You think it’s corny. It wants you to forget its directive, deliberately generic, if memorably brutal title. It wants you to laugh when the square-jawed hero (Lakshya) is introduced with a crunchy guitar riff. It wants you to roll your eyes when NSG commando Amrit Rathod trades barbs with his moustachioed best friend, Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), and it wants you to brace yourself for a typically broad action romance when the boys crash an engagement party at a Radisson hotel in Jharkhand, where Amrit’s wide-eyed sweetheart (Tanya Maniktala) is forced into an arranged marriage by her father.
After the festivities, Tulika and her family business empire board an overnight train to New Delhi to prepare for the wedding. Meanwhile, Amrit and Viresh sneak aboard with the firm intention of derailing the plan. Amrit may not be rich, but perhaps there is another way to impress Tulika’s father enough? Enter 40 machete-wielding bandits (a family business of another kind, it turns out), who start robbing the passengers and even take Tulika’s younger sister hostage for good measure. Just as Amrit and Viresh start partying, dacoits I bitterly regret having chosen this particular day to rob the Rajdhani Express, it seems that the film surrounding them has few surprises in store.
The joke is on our side, and the punchline – delivered when Bhat triumphantly drops the blood-spattered title card 45 minutes into the action – hits with the force of a steam locomotive. You see, the bandits may have thought They were hijacking the kind of movie that some might walk away with their limbs intact, but one of them, a handsome failed sociopath named Fani (Raghav Juyal), must have just gone a little too far. A big mistake. Huge. I mean, Amrit and Viresh, vastly outnumbered, weren’t even going to fight back at first! But our boys can’t help but crack up when Fani starts killing people.
And just like that, this slightly murderous, seemingly PG-13 love story erupts into a shameless, R-rated massacre that deserves comparison to “The Raid.” Jugs burst like water balloons. Heads are smashed against toilet seats until their faces go flat. One guy even gets beaten to death with a field hockey stick. The violence isn’t as relentless as it would be in a Gareth Evans movie, nor is the gore as ridiculously over-the-top. That’s only because this hyper-contained bloodbath doesn’t become more grounded and human-scaled as it rolls, its desperate pathos deepening at the same rate as its body count rises.
“Kill” is very, very good with its ultimately goofy title, but perhaps the most surprising thing about Bhat’s action extravaganza is that it subverts expectations without ever straying from the subject. An instant classic of the genre, already ripe for an English-language remake by the companies behind “John Wick,” this pulp film — so winking and cartoonish when it first leaves the station — is transformed into something achingly tender by its final destination.
That raw emotion is much easier to predict once it becomes clear that Bhat’s script has more in common with “Snowpiercer” than a “Die Hard” train ride like, say, “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory” (and what better praise could a critic give a script than to say that it doesn’t evoke “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory” as much as he thought it would?). “Kill” wears its socioeconomic tensions lightly, but they’re in every corner of its story, even if the beautifully rendered passenger train on which this story takes place doesn’t seem divided by class. In fact, the biggest flaw in the film’s excellent fight design is that the precise location of each fight (which car are the characters in?) is never as clear as the choreography of their movements.
What East It is clear that Amrit is deemed unworthy of Tulika’s love because of his rank, and that the bumbling family of bandits who storm the Rajdhani Express belong to an even lower caste. Fani, who takes control of the villains through sheer force of will, works at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere, where his unleaded frustrations are fuelled by his unfulfilled ambitions. Young, burly and somewhat unrealistic with a knife, Fani is one of the few dacoits destined to be the villain of an action film (because of his devilish grin and casual flair for misogyny). The rest of his brigade, most or all of whom are members of Fani’s extended family, are essentially glorified louts who have turned thieves only to rob themselves of a decent living. Their home-made weapons are so unreliable that hostages become a more effective weapon. Most of the men are not fit. Some are in their 50s and 60s. All but Fani see this as a shameful night mission, more an opportunity to improve their lot than to seek revenge. Until people start dying and the battle over Amrit becomes intensely personal for both sides.
In Kill, it’s politically telling that the crisis on the Rajdhani Express is never fully addressed by the government, and it’s equally telling that Tulika’s businessman father is presented as the only reason why it would be. Bhat doesn’t have the budget for the kind of third-act shenanigans that films of this genre often rely on to raise the stakes (even at the cost of lowering the suspense), but that doesn’t seem to be the only reason the police don’t intervene. Hell, the armed guards at the front of the train don’t even learn of the carnage unfolding a few cars behind them until it’s almost too late to help. The problems of the working class are so perfectly contained that everything seems fine during the wide shots we’re treated to of the train hurtling across the landscape; any help Amrit and Viresh might hope for must come from their fellow passengers.
But don’t worry, our boys are more than capable of handling themselves. Choreographed by action director Oh Se-young, whose previous training includes his stunts on “Snowpiercer,” the fights are a vicious and consistently satisfying display of close-quarters combat. The stabbing and individual stabbings are a bit slower than you might find in the “John Wick” movies of the world, but that’s more of a feature than a flaw in a film whose tight set pieces force characters to be precise in their movements, lest they accidentally kill an innocent cousin or passenger.
Such limitations allow Amrit’s skills to be even more deadly than they would be in public, and newcomer Lakshya—a TV dream making his feature film debut—wields a machete far more convincingly than he spews dialogue like “our love is much more powerful than his father.” (The worst groans are reserved for Fani, who at least gets to convey “the commander’s love fell on us like a bomb” in the bright-eyed delirium of a villain gone mad.) “Kill” finds enough different ways to get stabbed and/or bludgeoned to death that the fights never feel repetitive, with Bhat intercutting handheld close-ups with shots from a ceiling-mounted dolly to strike a clear, enduring balance between carnage and clarity.
Set to the gutsy tension of Ketan Sodha’s driving score, this dynamic reflects the way the film treats its sprawling cast, each member of whom we can recognize and respond to, even as character details are kept to a bare minimum. Amrit’s trajectory is the only one that really matters, and Bhat makes the most of his lead actor’s good looks, as Lakshya is perfect for the role of a fresh-faced matinee idol with features rendered almost unrecognizable under all the blood his character spills on the tracks — a corruption of the soul that “Kill” treats with just the right amount of seriousness for a film where someone says, “Oh, they’ll get off the train safely, but only for their funerals.”
Few action films have been as successful in subverting audience expectations, but Kill is more than a cheap bait. On the contrary, the story’s power comes from the fact that, for people like Amrit and Fani, even the simplest or most innocent dreams have been sold at a price they can barely dare to imagine, let alone afford.
Grade: B+
Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions will release “Kill” in theaters on Thursday, July 4.