Filled with a cornucopia of stabby weapons, Kill is a cut below classic violence ballets like The Raid. Provided you are a fan of clean, clear, close-quarters combat, that’s just fine. You don’t have to be the best at something to be tasty doing it, right Mr. Pibb?
The best thing about Kill is that the title card comes 45 minutes into the movie. It is a purposeful decision that cleaves the film nearly in half. For the first chunk, it is a movie about a military bad-ass named Amrit Rathod (Lakshya) punching and kicking bad guys on a train. For the last hour, it is a movie about a full-blown psychotic commando named Amit Rathod murdering so many people. Just so many. And in so many different ways. Many are skewered and stabbed. Others are bludgeoned with hammers. The creativity in killing would be admirable if it wasn’t, you know, murder.
To be fair, you’d want to kill these baddies too. Notably, Fani (Raghav Juyal) is a delicious blend of greasy and open-eyed. Instead of some wild villainous justification for why his family of bandits decided to unleash hell on a passenger train in India, Fani just casually says something to the effect of “We’re not good people.” True, Fani! Very true.
Another great thing about Kill is that it genuinely does not care about making some sort of argument about the futility of revenge. There’s no real theme or thesis here at all. They do justify Amrit’s descent into monstrous rage well enough, even if the filmmakers fall on a well-worn and kinda cringy trope to do so. But you get the sense that decision was more “what’s the fastest way we can absolve our hero of becoming a whirling dervish of death?”
The supporting characters barely even get simple, one-sentence descriptions. If you can say anything descriptive about Amrit’s military buddy, Viresh Chatwal (Abhishek Chauhan), other than “definitely has mustache,” congratulations. Judging the success of a film like Kill means only assessing how much glee the action tomfoolery filled you with. What it lacks in big set pieces or an escalating ladder of danger it makes up for in relentlessness and consistency.
The entirety of Kill probably has 20-30 nonfighting moments added altogether. Cowriter/director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat and team do a remarkable job ensuring that the action never feels monotonous, despite basically taking place in the same setting. Maybe it’s that everything is so easy to see, no tricks of lighting or hyperactive editing. It is just knife-punch-kicking and bare-knuckled brawling all the way down.
Allegedly, Kill is being reworked into a Hollywood adaptation by the folks behind John Wick. Sure. OK. Nothing is really gained by setting this in America, but when has that stopped anyone before. Let’s hope the remake doesn’t try to shoehorn in some larger message about the nihilism of vengeance or the importance of infrastructure. And Amrit’s buddy better retain that killer mustache.
Grade = B
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Rachel Ho from Exclaim! says “Kill combines ghastly imagination and pin-point execution, resulting in one of the most electric theatre experiences I’ve had this year. It’s terrifying, bloody and outlandish — exactly what we’ve always wanted in a summer blockbuster.”
Jeanette Catsoulis at the New York Times says “Manipulative to the max (one upsetting murder is almost pornographically protracted), Kill is dizzyingly impressive and punishingly vicious. In the press notes, the director tells us that he once slept through a similar attack by armed train robbers. No one is sleeping through this one.”
Nuha Hassan at Medium says “If the mission was to maximise violence after each round, this movie has shown that it can successfully one-up action sequences after each kill, and there isn’t a dull moment. This train ride is a thrill that never stops, and the beast within ravages his foes with ultimate, satisfying kills until it reaches its final destination.”