While watching Kill, you will find yourself staring at the floor several times. The most obvious reason is that at many points, what unfolds on screen will become a tad too much for your eyes to take. The other is that you will have to keep looking for your jaw which will meet the floor pretty often during its relentless, breathless, gory and altogether impressively and engagingly mounted 106-minute runtime.
Which is perhaps the bare minimum one would expect from a film called Kill. But this film, perhaps more of a genre-setter than a genre-bender in Hindi cinema, does much more than that. Ever since its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in October last year where it walked away with the first runner-up honour in the ‘People’s Choice Award: Midnight Madness’ category, Kill has been unanimously lauded for putting its money where its mouth is, delivering visceral violence in an action-packed, brutal behemoth of a film which could give the best in the business a run for their money. That it has been compared to the 2011 film The Raid and its sequel, both of which have been praised for their frenetic action choreography and bone-crunching gore, shows that Kill ticks all the right genre boxes even while working within the narrative framework of a Bollywood film.
Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, working out of a script he wrote eight years ago and “then forgot about it because it was too violent a film to make”, as the filmmaker told t2 recently, pulls no punches. Kill, which takes place within a single location, except for its flashback sequences, chooses a passenger train, packed to the rafters, from Ranchi to Delhi to unleash its shockingly graphic action showcase.
Kill — whose intention is spelt outright in its title — goes for the kill pretty early. Army commando Amrit (debutant Lakshya Kapoor, who prefers to be known mononymously by his first name and is the perfect choice for the part) and his colleague Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) board the same train in which the former’s ladylove Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) is being herded off by her rich family for an arranged marriage. Amrit aims to foil the plan and make off with Tulika after he goes down on one knee and proposes to her in the train toilet (how ‘aromatically’ romantic!)
But fate — and the film — have other things in mind. A band of 40 machete-wielding thieves board the train with the intention to rob the passengers, but once Amrit and his pal start smashing them to pulp — and this is not used as a figure of speech here but rather a descriptor for a large part of the end result of this film’s barbaric action — then there is scarcely a moment to breathe. The Army lads — the prime focus is obviously on Amrit here — are not in the mood to spare anyone, especially when the robbers start killing the passengers. When Amrit starts eliminating them one by one — employing some of the most extreme forms of violence, many of which involve making mincemeat by smashing, slicing or slamming and pretty often, all three — the stakes get emotionally personal for the robbers, led by gang leader Fani (Raghav Juyal, delightfully unhinged) and his father Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi).
Crash, boom, whack, thwack is the love (hate) language of Kill which goes lean and mean with its action, traversing territory no Hindi film has been to before. The closed confines of its canvas allow the action to be in your face — it is telling that Snowpiercer action man Se-yeong Oh designs the set pieces, collaborating with his War and Tiger 3 comrade Parvez Shaikh — allowing neither its players nor the audience any breathing room. The fight choreography works hand in hand with the cinematography (Rafey Mahmood) to hammer home some truly brutal action setpieces.
It is quite natural for your nerves to be shot about 20 minutes into Kill. But there is no complaining because you signed up for it. There is non-stop carnage — quite spectacular, we may add — which will bring on both gasps and groans (those in my show were quite shaken, in a good way, if that is possible). The frenzied bloodbath is surprisingly enjoyable — cathartic may be a stretch even for extreme action genre old hands — and Bhat goes full Die Hard on a train but always manages to keep his film on track (pun wholly intended). By the time the blood-spattered title card drops 45 minutes into the film, you are deep into the action, waiting for the next sequence, ranging from balletic brutal to comic-book mayhem, to blow your mind (and brains).
Jointly produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions — in a subversion of what the filmmaker-producer is traditionally known to put his money on — and Oscar winner Guneet Monga Kapoor, Kill is headed for a Hollywood remake, with John Wick maker Chad Stahelski putting his weight behind it. The Hindi original itself has the power and potential to travel wide. Gruesome has rarely been this awesome.
