On sheer quantity alone, the beats of Indian action movies can grow very tiresome if the action isn’t great. Some giant quasi superhero movie star will saunter in, lay waste to the bad guys, sing some songs, and get the girl. If that movie star was in Kill, he would brutally murder multiple henchmen, sever 3 of his own arteries, and limp to decapitate the big bad, then have sex with the girl right then an there. Kill has more in common with The Raid movies than it does Bollywood, amping up the excitement level for the audience…and the chances to get sick from the blood spilled and bones broken.
We’re in a bit of a jam on board a Delhi bound train. Amrit (Lakshya) and Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) are madly in love with one another, but her rich, powerful father Baldev Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya) has pre-engaged Tulika to be married in Delhi. Amrit and Tulika make a plan to elope once they get off in Delhi…but there’s a wrinkle. A family of 30+ train robbers are also on this train, led by Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi) and his son Fani (Raghav Juyal), who get loftier ambitions when they realize an ultra rich businessman and his family could be valuable kidnapped bargaining chips with the authorities.
Shock is going to be the first word most traditional movie watchers will say about Kill. But not me: mine would be untethered. This is the first Indian film since the early days of Bollywood where there is no musical number, leaning the movie out from what would have been 2 hours 2 minutes down to a pretty tight Hour 40. Lakshya is pretty hunky, but he’s also getting his butt kicked repeatedly here especially in the first 45 minutes. What I was watching was so far afield from the Bollywood action movies I had been seeing, that this rush of adrenaline started coursing through my veins. We’re in a new movie reality in Kill, which meant anything could be possible. The claustrophobic train and incredible sound design makes you feel like every bone in the human body is being broken with every clash, and because of the confined space, you’re forced to get up close and personal, with the only way out a vicious attack with a blunt object or a knife. I was reminded of The Raid 2’s sequence where someone with 2 claw hammers laid waste to a traincar. Kill ups the ante by 4 more train cars, and all sorts of scary car sequences, with lights off, bodies hanging from the cieling, and all the drapes to the sleeping quarters closed, meaning someone could be hiding there, ready to inflict the most brute, hurtful pain possible.
And at the 45 minute mark, something rather unexpected but unsurprising happens, triggering the movie’s title. Less a title actually, more a rousing to action for Amrit. All the horror movie previews I saw before Kill suddenly make sense: Amrit is less a superhero than a bull in a china shop, laying waste to everything he sees causing as much damage as possible, frightening everyone in his path. Why the change? Because Fani forgot one critical thing when it comes to robbing: never make it personal. Nothing rouses a person to action more than when you do something to the ones they love. What’s exciting about Kill though, is inside Amrit’s red fog, he forgot this lesson too, and the clearly bad meaning bandits rally around each other with the loss of of one of their close comrades, making each fight with Amrit a bloody more equally matched battle than the casting might predict at the outset. And by this point, we’ve gotten enough personality for a bunch of the bandits that we, well, don’t actually empathize with them, but are at least interested in them instead of just them getting murdered. The Fani/Beni dynamic is one of the sneaky great parts of Kill, as father and son clash about how to run their operation (in general, Lakshya isn’t the winner here but Raghav Juyal, giving a great action movie villain performance). As as more bodies hit the floor, we get more little personal vendettas to settle on this train for the bystanders, forced into action because of the bigger revenge motives at play around them.
If you’re squeamish, you probably wouldn’t be going to a movie called Kill anyways. But for those craving something different from their Indian cinema, this one delivers, pushing the boundaries a little further while also emotionally grounding the story in something relatable enough so the crunching and stabbing hurts you as much as it hurts the characters. I think I instinctually started limping walking out of Kill, a testament to the punishment I felt leaving that train to Delhi. Next stop: Jakarta, where Lakshya can team up with Iko Uwais to create the greatest international violent action movie ever: Kill 2 Raid 3.