KILL is a Hindi-language action movie currently playing in U.S. theaters via LionsGate. For some reason I was under the impression it was called KILL!, which is not the case, but the exclamation point is definitely implied.
It’s one of the more internationally accessible Indian films because it’s only 105 minutes, not a musical, and it begins with a very Hollywood sort of premise: DIE HARD on a train except not UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY.
But there’s a cultural aspect to the set up that wouldn’t be in the American version. When special forces commando Amrit (Lakshya, a TV star who gets an “introducing” credit) gets back from a mission, he finds out that his girlfriend Tulika (Tanya Maniktala, MUMBAIKAR) is being forced into an arranged marriage with someone else. So he and his mustachioed soldier buddy Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan, BAHUT HUA SAMMAAN) rush to the engagement party to try to whisk her away before it’s too late. But she fears what her powerful dad, wealthy industrialist Baldeo Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya, 24: India), would do, tells Amrit to back off, and later texts that she and her family are taking a train back to New Delhi.
Time for a romantic gesture: Amrit and Viresh get onto the same train, Amrit surprises Tulika in the bathroom and proposes. They’re going to work it out.
Except they’re in an action movie. Little do they know, a family of 45 bandits are on the train waiting for a signal to padlock some of the cars and rob everybody. It seems like they’ll just take as much cash and jewelry as they can, but when he finds out Baldeo Singh Thakur and family are on board, Fani (Raghav Juyal, a dancer who became famous as 2nd runner-up on the competition show Dance India Dance 3) decides to pivot to kidnapping and try to get a ransom.
So you know the deal: our handsome soldier hero and his sidekick will have to use their special kills to fight the bandits and save Tulika, and I bet at the end her dad will be so impressed he’ll let her marry him and everyone will live happily ever after. Except SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER we really don’t know the deal. KILL makes the shocking choice of having Fani brutally kill Tulika. Amrit drops to the floor and then it pulls a DRIVE MY CAR and drops the title card even though we must be at least half an hour into the movie and thought we were well on our way.
So the inspiration is not so much DIE HARD as the extreme action cinema of South Korea and Indonesia, especially stuff like THE RAID and THE NIGHT COMES FOR US. It mixes that kind of brutality with a love story and a little bit of the more over-the-top Arnold type of action, or what I think of as the spirit of ’87. It follows that movie rule that the more upset you get about a tragic death the stronger, faster and more resilient you become. Like Popeye eating spinach, Bane getting pumped full of venom, Pac-Man snorting a huge pile of crushed up power pellets. Amrit becomes an elite master of dodging, snapping and stabbing, and just rages through motherfuckers. He seems a little like Rambo but more like Jason Voorhees, the way he chops and slices through some of these guys like it’s nothing.
There’s another objective besides killing dudes. The late Tulika’s younger sister Ahaana (Adrija Sinha, Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors) was going to find an unoccupied restroom when the shit went down, now she’s trapped in a different car trying to hide her identity, so she needs to be rescued.
There is, of course, some action on the top and side of the train. Mostly there’s battling in the aisles, so there’s lots of choreography designed to take advantage of the close quarters – people getting knocked against the sides, heads bashed against lights. I’ve heard it described as leaning toward a more realistic style of action, but thankfully that’s an exaggeration. There’s way more kicking than in real life. The actors spent many months training with Korean action director Se-yeong Oh (SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE, THE YELLOW SEA, WAR OF THE ARROWS) and India’s Parvez Khan (CLASS OF ’83) for some very involved choreography. The location forces the camera to stay pretty close, but I didn’t find that to be a problem.
Fani is a really compelling villain, a weird combination of just-some-dude and supreme evil. I like that he’s introduced as kind of a fuck up, working at a gas station, getting a call and having to catch a ride on the back of his friend’s motorcycle, changing his shirt on the way, almost missing the train. (Too bad he didn’t.) He’s funny and he wants to do things different from how his uncles do, so he kind of fits the role of a sympathetic character, but then he goes out of his way to be way more of a bastard than the job requires.
There are other sub-villains, the type where you don’t need to know much about them, just that they’re a distinctively intimidating looking person who keeps showing up and fighting. The main one here is a huge guy named Siddhi (Parth Tiwari). When he first shows up he poses and the music makes it sound like his fists are charging up before he fires them off. When he starts swinging he seems super powered.
Amrit is a very simple character, not much to him, but that’s fine. Like THE RAID it’s designed not to go into too much detail about anything outside of the current situation. What’s important is the way the movie pumps him up to seem larger than life. That’s that ’87 I’m talking about. There’s a part where he takes his shirt off to deal with some wounds and one of the handful of people in the theater with me was pretty excited about it, I can tell you that much.
Ways it’s different from UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY: Not a criminal mastermind with an unprecedented scheme – just an armed robbery that escalates. No “Just How Badass Is He?” speech, so as far as we know maybe he’s not exceptional, maybe Indian commandos in general are unstoppable super killers. Higher ratio of action to hiding. It’s the bad guy who gets off the train and has to do something awesome to get back on, not the hero.
And there are two other aspects that really stood out to me as making it a little different from a standard approach. Most noticeably, Amrit is so over the top in the violence he might as well be a Predator or something. There’s a part where the bad guys find the bodies of their dead hung up all the way down the aisle. When one of the bandits gasps “You’re a fucking monster!,” he’s correct.
The second thing is really taking the time to show the bad guys mourning their dead. They’re all related, remember. When they find that midnight meat train car even the tough guys break down crying, hug the bodies. The filmatistic language treats Amrit as the hero, but there’s an irony in how both sides are continuing this marathon of senseless violence, everybody always claiming they’re avenging someone. There’s a scene where Siddhi is attacking Amrit, asking “Why did you kill my brother?” but some of the other passengers start bashing his head in, crying “Why did you kill my son?” Everyone here believes they’re the aggrieved party.
The movie’s world view seems suspect to me: heroic soldier, good-hearted rich family, savage working class family that starts the whole thing. But I appreciate giving some humanity to the bandits and making the hero so excessive in his vengeance that it arguably becomes satirical.
This is the fourth film by writer/director Nikhil Negash Bhat, who described it to Collider as “the first extreme action film coming out of India.” He already has another one called APURVA, described as a survival thriller, available on the Indian version of Disney+. In an interview with Firstpost he said that KILL was inspired by a time in the mid-‘90s when a train he was on got robbed. He was in a sleeper car when it happened but he woke up to find the train stopped, and learned that 25-30 thieves had beaten up and stabbed some of the other passengers. Apparently this is something that really happens, entire families robbing trains together. He says that trains are a popular, affordable method of travel in India, but this particular type of train is priced more comparable to a flight, so that’s how they knew the passengers would have money and valuables.
LionsGate is also planning an English-language remake of KILL, but don’t get upset. #1, Screen Gems tried the same thing with THE RAID, and it’s been 13 years. #2, it’s supposed to be produced by 87Eleven and Chad Stahelski, so it would have great action. #3 Nikhil seems to consider it an honor: “Normally what happens, we take the rights of Hollywood films and try to make an Indian film. This is one of its kind where an Indian film is adapted into a Hollywood film.”
In its original form I wouldn’t consider KILL a new classic, but definitely a recommended use of your time if you enjoy violent action formula.
July 17th, 2024 at 12:56 pm
Great review (as always). I went into seeing this film a week or so ago, half-expecting a song and dance number to appear at some point and, given the film, I was very glad one didn’t. The villains mourning for their dead really stuck out for me – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it shown to the degree shown here. The fact the bandits were all part of one extended family made a difference. Certainly worth the watch for the action.