Kill (2024)
Directed by: Nikhil Nagesh Bhat
Premise: An Indian film. A crew of bandits boards a train and assaults and robs the passengers. A pair of soldiers (Lakshya and Abhishek Chauhan) fight off the attackers.
What Works: Kill is an effectively made action picture in the mold of Die Hard. The story pits a pair of soldiers against a crew of armed bandits in a confined space. It’s a scenario we’ve seen many times in Cliffhanger, Under Siege, The Rock, and Air Force One, among other titles, but the filmmakers of Kill punch up the familiar premise with style and ferocity. Much of the movie takes place in the narrow confines of a passenger train and the filmmakers use space very well. A lot of Kill has a claustrophobic quality and the tight quarters require the fights to playout in close up with some inventive hand-to-hand combat. The violence is vicious. Quite often the action genre presents carnage without pain especially in PG-13 movies where people get shot and maimed but never bleed. Kill is extremely bloody. The violence has physical consequences in a way that gives the movie a lot of credibility but also makes the characters human and accessible. Although this is a super soldier story, the heroes of Kill get injured and physically struggle and that makes them sympathetic. The filmmakers are also willing to kill off characters we would expect to survive. No one is safe and that raises the stakes. Kill also takes the unusual step of characterizing the villains. The crew of bandits are more than just stooges. They are family and that changes the whole tone of the action. The family dynamics complicate the film’s brutality and unsettles the pruriently violent thrills that the action genre usually provides.
What Doesn’t: Easily the weakest element of Kill is the romance between the characters played by Lakshya and Tanya Maniktala. Their romance is under the table due to his profession and her family’s social stature and she is in an arranged engagement to someone else. The romance is necessary to the characters and the plot; it places the hero on the train and motivates his actions. But the romance isn’t done very well. Lakshya is great as an action hero but whenever he is required to be sensitive and in love his performance is awkward and not in a way that is endearing. The love story occupies a small but important part of the film and some of the emotional beats might hit more effectively if the romance was more engaging.
Bottom Line: Kill is a brutal action picture that is comparable to The Raid: Redemption and the better chapters of the John Wick series. Although the general premise is familiar, Kill is distinguished by its viciousness and characterization.
Episode: #1005 (July 21, 2024)