Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s killer action spectacle

The action film by screenwriter and director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, which is set in a single location, is a welcome change from the tried and tested “Die Hard on a Blank” trope. The brutal action in this film is confined entirely to a moving train to New Delhi, with the setting effectively serving as a version of Die Hard‘s Nakatomi Plaza, just tipped over on its side and sped through the Indian countryside. And it was a hell of a ride.

Kill wastes absolutely no time in getting moving. The train literally leaves the station after barely five minutes of screen time, taking with it our dashing hero Amrit (Lakshya), his beautiful bride Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) and his loyal right-hand man Viresh (Abhishek Cauhan). Barely another five minutes have passed when a gang of bandits emerge from the crowd of passengers and start brutally robbing everyone in sight.

It’s a very clever scenario for a thriller. The robbery takes place during a two-hour stretch with no planned stops, and the bad guys have jammed the phones and pulled the emergency brakes, so there’s no chance of escape and no one is coming to the rescue. That is, no one, apart from the two very pissed off army commandos on bus B1.

Amrit and Viresh are quick to spring into action, delivering a rapid barrage of high kicks and spinning elbow strikes that quickly make the bandits wish they had waited for the next move. The way Amrit goes from the doe-eyed boy who looked so lovingly at Tulika to a sinister mountain of muscle and evil intent is like a magic trick. His mustachioed friend also proves to be far more violent than his small stature and cozy sweaters suggest.

The action is kinetic and chaotic, as bodies bounce off seats, windows, floors, and ceilings. Bhat manages to capture the action clearly enough that we always know what’s going on, while still immersing us in the panic of the moment. From one fall to the next, we may lose track of which end of the train is which and which direction the characters are heading, but we always know where a punch came from and whose jaw just broke. And throughout it all, the action’s inexhaustible energy is complemented by a thunderous soundtrack that throws rock guitars, electronic beats, and guttural vocals into the mix.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Amrit keeps finding new ways to transform the limited resources at his disposal, from fire extinguishers to bedsheets, into deadly weapons. He and Viresh also make use of the many, many knives the bandits have brought on board, and the film is equally inventive in the way it uses them. In classic action movie style Kill also presents them with an unimaginably large man they must compete against: a giant in a tracksuit named Siddhi (Parth Tiwari), whose punches look as if they could splinter redwoods.

We always know exactly where Kill The course is set when the casually psychotic leader of the bandits, Fani (Raghav Juyal), sees Tulika for the first time. It is clear that Amrit will have to fight his way through carriage after carriage of villains to rescue her, with his last stop most likely being a bloody confrontation with Fani herself. But Kill still finds clever ways to exceed our expectations through the peculiar placement of dramatic beats, surprising tonal shifts, and just the way it constantly turns the geography of the plot on its head.

In a crucial moment of the plot that comes at a most unexpected time, Amrit is finally pushed too far. Up until then, he and Viresh have done their best not to kill anyone while fighting the bandits, but now Armit is in full berserker mode, tearing every new opponent to pieces and terrifying every viewer. Lakshya sells this animal transformation with aplomb, and this more gruesome brand of action is as imaginatively conceived and clearly executed as the comparatively gentler version that came before.

It also highlights another clever little decision that Kill The bandit clan is mostly made up of families, so every faceless thug Amrit disembowels is also the father, brother or cousin of someone else on the train. The scenes that foreground their horrified reactions to the carnage Amrit leaves behind are deftly handled, allowing the film to both delight in its emotive plot and enumerate the human cost of all those severed arteries. It’s a cliche at this point to talk about violence and revenge in terms of cycles, but Kill essentially gives that idea a physical form – a locked box rolling around a set track, with each blow echoing along its entire length and each murder making the world a little bit bloodier for everyone left behind.