Kill (Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, 2023)

 After his girlfriend Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) is engaged to another man, commando Amrit (Lakshya) arrives at the engagement party to try and convince her to break it off. He fails.

Both lovers end up on the same train home, and Tulika accepts Amrit’s marriage proposal.

This bliss is disrupted when bandits take over the train, and a fatal turn lead Amrit to turn his lethal skills on the attackers…

I like movies set in a single location. I love action movies set in single locations. And if said location is a train???

Kill is the latest addition to this subgenre - and it’s a good one.

This movie manages to pull off something that I generally fight against in these kinds of high concept action movies.

It manages to juggle multiple plot and character threads without losing a sense of pace or the focus of the story.

Ideed, I faulted the last attempt at a movie like this, Bullet Train, because it was crowded with too many characters and flashbacks.

The film spends almost equal time with the bandits, who are shown to be family.

Rather than faceless henchmen to be run into the fists and feet of our hero, they take up half of the narrative space.

Their motivations push the narrative forward as much as our heroes’.

They are an irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

45 minutes in the film turns the knife, and hits us with the film’s title card, and it gains - if not a new meaning - a turbo-charge of emotion.

After this brutal punctuation, the film flips from an action film to a revenge thriller.

In the lead role, Lakshya manages to handle this switch without missing a beat.

A great physical presence, he is convincing in the action sequences as both a put-upon underdog hero struggling against the odds, and as a focused killing machine. He also has a highly expressive face, lending a humanity to what could have just been a rote action hero.

Even after the villain’s actions trigger our hero’s transformation, the filmmakers continue to track them. 

Action movies are based on a justification for violence.

It is a testament to this film’s sense of dramatic focus that our hero feels totally justified in turning his opponents into spaghetti bolognese while we continue to track the deteriorating dynamic between the villain and his uncle/boss.

 

The blurred line between the one-man action and slasher horror genres is completely destroyed.

I wish I had got to watch this movie in theatres. 

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