KILL

When army commander Amrit (Lakshya) discovers that his girlfriend Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) has been engaged to someone else, at the command of her businessman father Baldev Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya), they hatch a plan to escape and elope.

Unfortunately, as they make their way across country on a train they are the subject of a brutal terrorist attack.

The marketing for Kill has positioned it as one of the most violent films that India has ever produced. And it definitely lives up to that moniker. 

From start to finish it serves up fight after fight, blood upon blood and kill after kill. For better and for worse.

The action looks incredible. It is very well choreographed, and the fight scenes feel real. Each punch has a weight behind it. A heft that you don’t always see in modern action films. It pushes the boundaries of brutality in its violence, to extents that overly sanitised Hollywood fare would rarely dare tread, and never shies away from showing it to the audience.

This is even more impressive when you consider the budget. Kills budget has been quoted at “RS 25 crores”, which, if I’m correct, translates to a little over $2,000,000.

The problem I had is that after a while the constant, sustained, violence got a little… boring. While it is, as I’ve said, really well done, the consistency of it over a two hour run, with very little down time from it, weakens its effectiveness. 

Films like John Wick can get away with this, in part, due to the variety of location, and the versatility in the action that this allows.

Kill does, for 95% of its runtime, take place on one train. While this does allow for some entertaining fight scenes and a real sense of claustrophobia - a sense that there is no escape and therefore no option but to fight - it is also limiting in what it can allow the filmmakers to do. There are only so many fights in tight carriages you can do before the start to feel a little same-y. 

It gets no less violent as the film progresses, if anything its brutality ratchets up as we go on, but the lack of diversity in it’s action is felt as we get closer to the end. 

In the midst of all the violence the character work here is interesting, especially with the films antagonists. 

Kill manages to avoid the pitfalls of having its villains feel like anonymous henchmen. Each one has relationships with the others. And when one dies the film shows you the effect that it has on the rest of the group. They are a family and this really comes across, adding to the motivation and desperation of the bad guys as the film barrels towards its final destination.

Raghav Juyal, as leader of the terrorist group Fani, is fantastic, oozing charisma and sleaze, and his reaction to a situation rapidly falling out of his control feels authentic.

On the other side of the character work we have Baldev Singh Thakur. The terrorists talk of him with fear. Of the ease in which he could have them killed in the outside world. Yet this never comes across. Not in the way the character is written, or in how he is performed. There’s an odd disconnect here which suggest that writer/director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat was far more interested in his villains than he was in anyone else.

Narratively, there isn’t much of a plot - story really isn’t the point when it comes to Kill - but in what little story there is it does manage to spring the odd surprise. Without the constraints of Hollywood, and a committee of producers playing it safe in the hopes of pulling in a wide audience, it does have the freedom to take risks, and when it does, it does so successfully. I would have just liked to see a little more of this, breaking up the action a little and allowing us to get to know the characters a bit better.

And speaking of Hollywood, it has been reported recently that stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski, of the aforementioned John Wick series will be developing and directing an American remake of Kill, and I will be interested to see what this is like. 

One thing you cannot accuse Kill of is being sanitised, like much of Hollywoods output. The violence seems real, the pain - physical and emotional - that these characters are in feels genuine.  And I think we can expect to see this scaled back in an American version. 

But with the extra money that Hollywood will bring it may be able to be a little more inventive with its setting, allowing what violence there is to be sustained over its run time.

It will be a balancing act to take what is great about Kill, improve where improvements are needed, and still package it for a mainstream audience, but perhaps with his experience in stunts and filmmaking Stahelski is the best person to make it work. 

Kill is a film that lives and dies on its commitment to the premise. Ultra violence in a single location. When it works, it really works, but cannot sustain this for an entire run time. It certainly lives up to the promise of being one of Indias most violent films, but doesn’t manage to deliver on the hype it has generated in the build up to its release.