Kill

  Amrit (Lakshya) and Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) are two star-crossed lovers travelling on a long-distance train to New Delhi. Tulika's father (Harsh Chhaya), a powerful businessman, has set an arranged marriage for her, and doesn't even know of Amrit's existence. In fact, Tulika is in the train returning from her engagement to some rando, and Amrit is there to propose to her himself.

 Things get complicated when a horde of bandits (dacoits, Wikipedia informs me) spring a plan to rob everyone on the train. It's supposed to be a simple smash-and-grab, but when they discover that Tulika's father is a passenger, they switch over to kidnapping mode. Amrit and an old friend (Abhishek Chauhan) object strongly.

 Now's probably the time to mention that both Amrit and his buddy are highly trained army commandoes.  When the bandits attack Tulika's family, Amrit kills off one of the attackers and absconds to a different carriage with a few of the passengers. And so begins a running battle between Viresh (sometimes accompanied by others, but mostly alone) against forty-odd thieves in the cramped confines of the train carriages. At first it looks like it's going to be a standard action movie - like, say, the similarly train-bound sequel to Under Siege - but forty minutes in something happens, the title card slams on the screen with an eerie sense of purpose, and the film suddenly gets a lot more interesting.

 Kill is a strange movie. It's easy to roll your eyes at the melodramatic set-up, but hard not to be impressed by the balls of its second-act derailment into a different subgenre of action film. One that's a hell of a lot bleaker.

 As Amrit carves a bloody swathe across the mass of criminals occupying the train in the latter part of the movie, it quickly becomes clear that they're basically a clan, a few extended families united in banditry. And director Nikhil Bagesh Bhat, who co-wrote the script with Ayesha Syed, never passes up the chance to show the emotional distress of these people as they find their family members butchered by our protagonist. The film's most harrowing scene, in fact, is from their point of view as they cross a carriage where Amrit strung up half a dozen of his victims as a form of psychological warfare - including a guy whose head he caved in with a fire extinguisher; The association with Irreversible is probably unintended but hard to unsee.

 It seems to be attempting to say something, but the message seemed to me to be hopelessly muddled. This is one of those films where our hero often behaves more like a horror movie villain, and where the violence successfully crosses over the line into disturbing more than a few times. To what end? Beats me. The villains, especially Amrit's nemesis Fani (Raghav Juyal), all stay villains until the very end, and it's not like there's a decent character arc for Amrit or any of the other passengers. It still seems to come down as in favour of violence against evildoers, even if said violence is sometimes icky, and the plot doesn't really hold many surprises once it's revealed its hand.

 The moves are mostly MMA-inspired and grittily realistic even as the amount of punishment a body can endure without shutting down is gleefully exaggerated. Some of the blood splatter is CGI, but most of the blood seems to be done with practical makeup effects; It's a good balance, and looks pretty great. The one exception is yet another misguided attempt to do CGI flames, but the kill is still pretty spectacular so I'll let it slide.

 As for the violence. it's well blocked and choreographed, exciting and yes, extremely bloody - while the editing is a bit choppier than I'd prefer*, what's happening is always clear and the film makes good use of the cramped carriage interiors to force one- or two-on-one fights. There's even a fight on a restroom where porcelain is cracked by a cranium; this is a movie that clearly understand the genre it's working within.

 There's an unavoidable monotony to the film's series of encounters within what's essentially a very narrow passageway. While the creative kills, varied fights, and unrelenting intensity do ease it a little bit, it gets a little wearying after a while, especially when the script doesn't find a way to add another dimension to the plot or its characters, or a way to expand on its themes.

 I don't tend to get on with Bollywood films, but asides from a really intrusive (instrumental) score, nothing really bothered me here. It's a lean, focused effort - the film's director has been pretty open about designing it with western audiences in mind. Sure, some of the dialog is pretty clunky, but it's not like action in general has a great track record in that department.

 It might not manage to articulate its message, but it's still a lot of fun, and the added discomfort does add a certain edge to it. Lakshya and Juyal are both charismatic and make for compelling antagonists. And yeah, the action, even if it's not hugely varied, is still pretty great.

*: None of the principals being martial artists might be a factor in the decision to go with that style.