INDIAN cinema finally wears its big boy pants with Kill, an action thriller that abandons the notorious tropes the country’s film industry and Indians in general have long been enamoured with.
That is not to say there Kill does not feature the sappy melodrama and romantic cliches that its cinematic siblings have. In fact, the first half of the film is precisely that.
After returning from training, National Security Guard (NSG) commando Amrit Rathod (Laksh Lalwani) finds out about the engagement of his girlfriend Tulika Singh (Tanya Maniktala) to someone else.
The engagement was arranged by Tulika’s business tycoon father Baldeo Singh Thakur and she goes along with it due to a fear of reprisal from him, until Amrit shows up at the engagement.
Aided by Viresh Chatwal (Abhishek Chauhan), another NSG commando, the couple decide the best time to elope would be during the Thakur family’s train trip back to New Delhi from Ranchi in Jharkhand.
Unfortunately for the couple, Viresh, the rest of the Thakur family and every civilian on board the train, about 40 criminals decide to rob everyone on the locomotive.
Keeping audience on their toes
According to Google Maps, there is an airport in Ranchi and New Delhi.
The fact that the Thakur family are depicted as being wealthy but for some unfathomable reason have chosen to travel in a train instead of
a plane is probably the only absurd leap in logic that Kill and its writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat makes.
Nikhil’s other filmmaking decisions are the exact opposite. Like an experienced orchestra conductor, he knows the precise timing for when things should occur relative to what the audience is feeling.
In the audience’s eye, Kill opens with what could be mistaken as any other generic Indian romance film and it stays that way for a while. Just as it reaches a nauseating crescendo, Nikhil brings the criminals into the picture. Now, it is different, more akin to a standard Indian action film, with passengers being slashed, robbed and intimidated.
As the tune starts to grow thin and the audience begins to wonder what the hype was all about, Nikhil changes it again by showing he is not playing at the same level as the rest of the Indian film industry.
In his film, none of the lead characters are safe. Perfectly timed at exactly 45 minutes, Kill’s title card finally flashes on the screen. From this point on, the film begins to earn its stripes as the most violent film to come out of India.
Slow train coming
As great as trains are for brief action sequences, it is harder to set 90% of an action film on a train. Having characters fight in the narrow corridors and each train car’s vestibule works in short durations but how do you make it fresh for an entire film?
For Nikhil, he simply escalates the violence, cribbing choreography and cinematography from Western and other Asian action films to elevate Kill’s escalating intensity.
As previously mentioned, the film goes from dull slashes to close-quarters combat, heads being viscerally bashed and cleaved, along with people getting stabbed in their torso, limbs and faces. Someone even gets a crude “Glasgow smile” and Kill shows it all without whipping the camera away.
Put through the physical wringer, Laksh is great as Amrit. Though it is likely that the martial arts used by real life NSG commandos is better,
the actor’s physicality and the choreography between him and the stunt extras are effective in selling the illusion that Amrit (and Viresh) are trained soldiers going against untrained criminals. These fight sequences are complex but grounded in reality giving the film it a refreshing feel from the WWE-style fare of yore.
Films such as The Raid and John Wick are very much an inspiration here even if the film does not truly reach the heights of those modern classics. Despite that, the effort by Nikhil to try something so diametrically opposite to the other Indian action films has to be applauded, especially when the end results are as good and entertaining as Kill turned out to be.
Kill can be rented on Apple TV+.
