Kill movie review: This fast-paced story by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat is its own creature, taking care to surround us with familiar aspects even as it ramps up the death quotient to the highest possible level.
Complaining about gratuitous violence in 'Kill' is meaningless because the film is nothing more than a run of episodes dripping with an unbelievable amount of blood and gore, something we haven't seen in Hindi cinema before. This is a no-holds-barred, nasty pro-max film that goes for the jugular and everywhere else, bowing to genre clichés as it begins: slash, bang, thud, rinse, repeat.
The one line story– two commandos up against a bunch of bandits who invade a train going from Ranchi to Delhi — is basically an excuse for the action director and the fight choreographer to conjure up the many ways to kill a man. And, yes, a woman.
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Those who enjoy genre films and have seen how the South Koreans do it ('Train To Busan', 'Snowpiercer') would appreciate the desi 'Kill' derivative. But that would be ignoring how much this Nikhil Nagesh Bhat's fast-paced tale is its own creature, which takes care to surround us with familiar elements even when ratcheting up the kill quotient as high as it can go: the good guys are patriotic Army commandos, the bad guys are modern-day versions of the good ol' dakus, there is romance in the air, the young lovers steal moments in the crowd, and the overweight cops, as always, bring up the rear.
A film titled 'Kill' allows for no nuance. We knew there would be blood before we went in. The question is how 'palatable' this'maar-dhhad' is. Will it make us grimace in anguish and close our eyes to the relentlessness of it all? Or will it become a spectator sport, with us, the spectators, rooting for the good guys to crush the baddies to pulp?
On that score, I can tell you that while I did the wincing and closing-the-eyes bit, I also succumbed to a moment or two of visceral delight at both seeing the bad guys get theirs, as well as marvelling at the action experts who made each of these kills different, using different parts of the train, and different methods of killing, to the hilt.
There's also an excuse for all the carnage in the slender storyline, which has just enough weight to carry all this slashing and shooting: one of the commandos, Amrit (Lakshya), is in love with Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), who is on the train with her heavy dad Thakur Baldev Singh (Harsh Chhaya) and younger sister (Adrija Sinha); the other, Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), equally skilled in weaponry and single-hand combat, is also busy fulfilling that old Bollywood trope, as the
The posse of dakus is led by a son-and-father duo (Raghav Juyal as Fani, and Ashish Vidyarthi as Beni), and once the bets are off, triggered by a killing which feels even more gratuitous than the others, it’s a free-for-all, and the body count piles in grisly, grotesque ways. One, involving a fire extinguisher and a human head, is going to give me nightmares, despite my high tolerance for the shoot-and-scoot kind of movie.
The things that make this film distinctively desi also distract from the main task: the romantic bits between Amrit and Tulika are banal but mercifully brief, as Lakshya is much better at snarling-and-killing than canoodling; and the insistence on making the bad guys human (there are tears when they find their compatriots twisted in shapes no living being can pull off, boo hoo), comes across as more of a digression than anything else. Making Fani this baddie who can easily go between humorous and savage is also a stereotype, as is riffing on Bollywood sentences and inventing his own ('tum Rakshak ho ya Raakshas'?), even though Juyal is the most effective component of this film: he makes us appreciate him being a terrible person.
The film itself makes itself desi because of all its references, from ‘DDLJ’ (can there be a pair of lovers on a train which doesn’t remind us of that iconic love-story?) to ‘QSQT’ (heavy-handed Thakur dads are clearly still in vogue), to the hero’s name which is that of a film in which our boys from the Army won over an enemy, to the old ‘dhanda’ of ‘chori-chakaari’ and ‘firauti’? But it’s also savage enough to really raise the stakes– it doesn’t pussy foot about trying to save all the main characters and sacrifice the ‘sidies’– which then gives Amrit reason to rampage the way he does.
So, that’s where it comes down to. Are you a fan of movies in which piling up bodies is the only reason for their existence, in which each kill comes wrapped in stylistic flourishes which then invites a counter and that’s how it goes, back and forth? And have you been thirsting for a desi Bullet Train, Die Hard, John Wick, or all of the above? Then this one’s for you.
‘Kill’ is a lean, mean killing machine. Get out of the way, if you’re faint of heart. Or hold your breath, and swing aboard for a wild, wild ride.
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