Kill pushes the limits of Bollywood’s typically conservative tolerance for blood and guts.Supplied
- Kill
- Written and directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat
- Starring Lakshya, Tanya Maniktala and Raghav Juyal
- Classification N/A; 105 minutes
- Opens in theatres July 5
Critic’s Pick
A film that answers the likely unasked-till-now-but-still-important question of what would happen if John Wick boarded the train in Snowpiercer, the new Hindi-language film Kill is a spectacular exercise in high-speed, throat-kicking chaos.
Pushing the limits of Bollywood’s typically conservative tolerance for blood and guts, writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s feature is built on a number of sly narrative and stylistic tricks that gradually cement its status as a new action classic full of nasty surprises.
The film opens with a strain of chaste romantic melodrama that might be more familiar to fans of co-star Tanya Maniktala, here playing a young woman named Tulika who is engaged against her will to a wealthy dud when in fact she is in love with the stoic army commando Amrit (Lakshya). In a bid to stop the impending marriage, Amrit boards an overnight train bound for New Delhi, which is carrying Tulika and her entire family. But when the train is boarded by a group of ruthless thugs, Amrit is forced to deploy his very particular set of skills to ensure the safety of his sweetheart.
For its first half-hour, Kill’s fights are plentiful if slightly pedestrian in their staging and speed. Amrit can kick, punch and stab with the best of ‘em, but there is a repetitiveness to the choreography that just barely keeps the audience hanging on. It turns out that the slow-blow pacing is deliberate, though, with Bhat suddenly turning things upside-down and ramping up the intensity to a neck-snapping degree.
Without spoiling the details of this twist, the delayed moment of narrative and aesthetic acceleration is also when the director finally drops the film’s title card on-screen, resulting in one of the best late-movie “opening” credit moments since Drive My Car.
Finding inventively lethal uses for everything from curtains to fire extinguishers, Amrit is a one-man killing machine who might even scare off Mr. Wick, and Lakshya conjures the hero with frightening ferocity. And the good guy’s strengths are matched beat for bloody beat by Fani (Raghav Juyal), who leads his familial band of thieves with a wildly psychotic blood-lust.
Inspired by the real-life phenomenon of Indian train robbers dubbed “dacoits,” Bhat’s film ingeniously amps up the stakes by having all the goons be members of the same extended family. When one is dispatched, the other is driven to furious action to avenge his fallen uncle, cousin or brother. And as the body count rises on both sides, the film toys with the concept of just what “family honour” means to different clans and classes.
Naturally, there are already plans for an English-language remake of Kill, produced by John Wick’s own director Chad Stahelski. But for action-movie purists, Bhat’s train ride hell needs no translation. Bite your tongue, and keep your kicks high.