Tag Archives: Nikhil Nagesh Bhat

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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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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Movie Review: Hurdang (2022)

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Zero Stars (out of 4)

The social drama Hurdang fails to build a persuasive case for the odious politics it endorses.

Hurdang is set at a college campus in Allahabad in 1990. Local goon and opportunist Loha Singh (Vijay Varma) wants to increase his political profile. He seizes upon the announced implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations — which would increase the number of university admissions and government jobs reserved for people from Other Backward Classes — as an opportunity to stoke unrest on campus and gain attention.

Loha uses his right-hand man Daddu (Sunny Kaushal) to activate the upper caste students at several area colleges. Daddu is enrolled in university, but you’d hardly know it since he never studies or goes to class. He carries multiple guns with him and is quick to point them at anyone who gives him even a minor hassle.

Daddu’s pitch to get the students to protest against the government is that the predominantly upper caste students currently enrolled in university have made their plans expecting a certain amount of government jobs to be available to them upon graduation, and that changing the rules now unfairly penalizes them. The movie makes only passing mention of the generational damage caused by systemic caste discrimination.

Writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s choice to put Daddu at the center of this story is absurd. Daddu has no chance of graduating as a result of his own (non-existent) efforts, so he plans to get the final exam questions from Loha in advance and cheat. He does not see his own cheating as being at odds with the system of meritocracy he believes exists and that the reservation system supposedly undermines. What matters to the narrative is that Daddu is a victim.

The notion of Daddu as a victim is even more ridiculous considering the privileges Daddu enjoys thanks to his relationship with Loha — and by extension the politicians Loha works for. Twice, Daddu steals a baton from a police officer and beats the officer with it, and he never faces any consequences for it. Daddu is above the law in almost every respect, but the film really wants viewers to feel sorry for him.

Bhat’s story is so lopsided that it barely acknowledges that people from lower castes exist, let alone suffer under a system rigged against them. Daddu’s much more academically talented girlfriend Jhulan (Nushrratt Bharuccha) is herself from a lower caste — a fact that’s only relevant for a scene in which her father tells her to wait until the reservation quota has been updated to take her finals so that she’ll have an easier time getting a government job. Jhulan is portrayed as virtuous for wanting to test right away and pass on her own merits. From the movie’s perspective, benefiting from a rule change is more egregious than stealing an exam and cheating.

The political position Bhat takes with his story is gross, but he doesn’t even do a good job of defending it. Hurdang is awful.

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