Tag Archives: Apurva

Movie Review: Kill (2023)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Buy or rent Kill on Amazon Prime

Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions deviates from its signature lush romantic dramas to produce Kill, an extremely violent movie that is visually stunning in its own way. After wowing audiences at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere in 2023, Kill found an international distributor in Lionsgate, which is giving the movie a major theatrical release in the United States on July 4, 2024.

Kill‘s protagonist Amrit is played by TV actor Lakshya, who makes his big-screen debut in the first of the three movies he’s under contract for with Dharma Productions. Amrit is an Indian Army commando who returns from an assignment to a slew of missed messages from his girlfriend Tulika (Tooth Pari‘s Tanya Maniktala). Tulika’s powerful, well-connected father has arranged her engagement to another man, and Amrit must rescue her before the wedding.

Amrit crashes Tulika’s engagement party while his friend and fellow commando Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) waits in the getaway car. Tulika says it’ll be safer for Amrit to rescue her after her family’s overnight train ride to Delhi, so he and Viresh sneak onto the train.

Unfortunately, the train is targeted by an extended family of about three dozen bandits who intend to isolate several train cars and rob all of the passengers of their valuables within 30 minutes. It should be an easy job, but they didn’t bargain on there being commandos onboard.

Amrit and Viresh are able to knock out several of the thieves in their carriage, but one attacks Viresh with a knife. Viresh instinctively turns the knife around to stab his attacker, killing the man. The bandit’s death changes the terms of engagement, and the gang’s mission expands to include murdering the commandos and any unfortunate passenger who gets in their way.

The repercussions of death is a theme that the movie returns to time and again. Whenever a person on either side of the fight between bandits and non-bandits dies, it raises the stakes by motivating the living to take revenge. Constantly reminding viewers that each character has someone who will grieve their passing keeps the deaths from being trivialized — a tricky but laudable goal in a film with a high body count.

Also raising the stakes are the cramped quarters within which the fighting takes place. Amrit and Viresh punch and kick the bad guys in the narrow corridor running through the middle of the train car, trying to avoid injuring frightened passengers in the process. Squaring off in the open space next to the bathroom feels comparatively luxurious. All the while, they and their opponents find novel ways to utilize the tools at their disposal. Amrit’s use of a fire extinguisher is particularly gruesome.

That said, Kill is more violent than it is gory. There’s much more blood than viscera, if that makes a difference. In some ways, the violence in Kill is less shocking than other instances of violence in Hindi films. Context is important, and Kill is very clear about what kind of movie it is (the title is kind of a giveaway). I found the violence in a film like 2013’s Boss much more unsettling given its tonal inconsistency. One minute, Akshay Kumar’s character is humorously hitting his opponents on the head with coconuts, the next he impales a man in the chest with a circular saw blade.

The execution of the action in Kill is second to none. Action directors Se-yeong Oh and Parvez Shaikh give every move weight, and they maneuver the characters through the cramped carriage in a way that seems physically impossible. As the characters’ injuries mount, their fighting speed and power ratchet down to make it more believable.

Lakshya is a legit action star, even after just one movie. As Vidyut Jammwal branches out from martial arts flicks and Tiger Shroff reevaluates after successive box office flops, Lakshya is ready to fill the void. Chauhan’s Viresh is no less dynamic and exciting in his fight scenes.

Maniktala’s Tulika is more than just a damsel in distress, displaying courage when the bandit leader’s son Fani (Raghav Juyal) sets his eyes on her. Juyal wisely underplays Fani so that he’s not too slimy or menacing, but still dangerous because he knows he operates from a privileged position.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Kill is that it is so good despite being directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat. Bhat directed what I thought was the worst Hindi movie of 2022 (the morally odious Hurdang), and his bandit action flick Apurva made my “Worst of” list in 2023 as well. Clearly Dharma Productions saw something in Bhat’s abilities that I hadn’t before. Credit to his Kill co-writer Ayesha Syed as well.

The whole film works because it routinely pauses so that characters (and the audience) can process their emotions. No one can fight for two hours non-stop anyway, allowing Bhat to lean into the melodrama, anger, and heartbreak the characters are feeling during those pauses in the action. In that sense, Kill feels at home in the filmography of the same studio that developed Kabhi Khushi Khabie Gham.

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Worst Bollywood Movies of 2023

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Let’s take one last look at the Worst Bollywood Movies of 2023. Good riddance.

Vidyut Jammwal starred in my favorite Hindi film of 2022 — Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 — but he wound up on my Worst of 2023 list with his dull historical spy drama IB71 (his first film as producer, unfortunately).

Two films earned their spots because of messy story construction: the continuity disaster/murder mystery Gumraah and the disjointed romantic comedy Tiku Weds Sheru.

Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ka Jaan was made for hardcore Salman Khan fans, but even they might want to skip it due to some offensive jokes and needless violence.

It’s always disappointing when filmmakers botch their attempts to make movies centered around strong women characters. Apurva and Mrs Undercover are two prime examples of movies that don’t help the cause of women’s empowerment as much as they’d hoped.

The next two movies on the list tried to use excessive, gory violence to be edgy but just wound up mean and depressing: Animal and Kuttey.

The crime drama Operation Fryday (aka “Shooter“) sat on the shelf for more than a decade before its release on Zee5. It should have stayed on the shelf forever, because it was by far the most ineptly made movie of the year.

The worst film on the list is more technically competent than Operation Fryday, but it’s completely morally indefensible. Bawaal equates marital problems to the Holocaust, complete with the characters imagining themselves in black & white recreations of gas chambers. Filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari frames the story’s main character (played by Varun Dhawan) as simply a guy who needs to grow up and not as an abuser who physically assaults children and refuses to let his disabled wife (played by Janhvi Kapoor) leave the house. The moral compass behind Bawaal is way, way off. It’s easily the worst Hindi film of 2023.

Kathy’s Worst Bollywood Movies of 2023

  1. Bawaal — stream on Amazon Prime
  2. Operation Fryday — stream on Zee5
  3. Kuttey — stream on Netflix
  4. Animal — stream on Netflix
  5. Mrs Undercover — stream on Zee5
  6. Apurva — stream on Hulu
  7. Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan — stream on Zee5
  8. Tiku Weds Sheru — stream on Amazon Prime
  9. Gumraah — stream on Netflix
  10. IB71 — stream on Hulu

Previous Worst Movies Lists

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Movie Review: Apurva (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

Watch Apurva on Hulu

A kidnapped woman fights for her life in the survival thriller Apurva, which is nowhere near as exciting as that summary makes it sound.

Apurva opens not with the title character — played by Tara Sutaria in what is clearly supposed to be her breakout, solo-heroine role — but with her kidnappers: a dull quartet of crude, violent thieves lead by Jugnu (Rajpal Yadav). Sukkha (Abhishek Banerjee) is second in command, with Balli (Sumit Gulati) and Chhota (Aaditya Gupta) rounding out the group. They beat people to death and have literal pissing contests out in the bleak Chambal desert. They’re too cliched to be scary, even though composer Ketan Sodha tries his best to make them seem so with some threatening background music.

After spending too much time with these dullards, we finally meet Apurva. She’s on a bus to Agra to surprise her fiance Sid (Dhairya Karwa) for his birthday. En route, Jugnu & Co kill the bus driver and rob the passengers. Sid calls during the robbery, and Sukkha answers, telling him they’re taking beautiful Apurva with them.

Just in case we doubted whether a man engaged to a woman who cares enough to surprise him for his birthday would actually want her back, we get a flashback and song montage detailing Apurva’s introduction to Sid and their bubbly courtship. With their mutual affection confirmed, we can rest assured that Apurva has a reason to live and that Sid will try to save her.

Thus Apurva endures one of the least-interesting movie kidnappings ever. She spends a good chunk of time knocked out after Chhota slaps her. At one point, an astrologer (Rakesh Chaturvedi Om) randomly wanders into the ruins of the village where they’re holding her, despite it being well off the road and miles from anyplace inhabited.

Things get even sillier when writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat — the filmmaker responsible for last year’s awful movie Hurdang — tries to tie the astrologer’s presence into the plot via a flashback with Sid that only highlights just how illogical his involvement is. Then again, that kind of fits in a movie where I repeatedly yelled at the main character to “just run!” when she was sitting there, waiting for her captors to find her.

Apurva is so insubstantial that there’s little chance for Sutaria to show off any heretofore unseen acting chops. She spends much of the film slowly moving barefoot through the ruins or yelling while lifting heavy objects, despite the fact that there’s nothing around to muffle sounds and her captors would obviously hear her. The thieves are a bunch of hapless jackasses, and Sid isn’t present enough for Karwa to have an impact. If you want to watch a “woman in trouble” film, watch Anushka Sharma in NH10 instead.

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Streaming Video News: November 16, 2023

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I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with today’s addition of Shilpa Shetty’s comedy Sukhee. The new Hindi series The Railway Men premieres on Saturday, November 18.

I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with today’s additions of Vicky Kaushal’s film The Great Indian Family, Boyz 4 (Marathi), Good Night (Tamil), and Tiger Nageswara Rao (Telugu). Yesterday, Prime added the Thai-English romantic comedy about drama at an Indian wedding, Congrats My Ex.

Checking the Amazon Prime catalog the other day, I found updated links for a bunch of Bollywood movies that expired a while ago. Here’s what’s available on Prime once more:

Finally, I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Hulu with the straight-to-streaming debut of the thriller Apurva, starring Tara Sutaria. The Malayalam movie Kannur Squad is also now streaming (available in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu as well).

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