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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