Unnecessary, sadistic, entertaining action and not much more

In the cartoonishly violent Indian action film Killa gang of train robbers face off against a single unstoppable passenger. Throats are slit, fingers crushed, knives, cleavers, hammers and fists swing wildly. Bodies sustain unrealistic injuries and carry on in search of revenge. (Can a human really be hit by a lead pipe?) The many times and still get back up?) The one-part title actually doesn’t appear on screen until nearly 45 minutes in, and serves both as an underscore of the blood and bodily harm that writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat has served up to that point, and as a promise (to those of us who already enjoy this stuff with a guilty conscience) that things will only get more unnecessary and sadistic from here on out. A promise that is, for the most part, relied upon Kill delivers purposefully.

Almost the entire film takes place on board an overnight train to New Delhi. The passing landscape is a dark, blurry green screen. The bandits, led by the sociopathic Fani (Raghav Juyal, better known in India as a professional dancer and reality TV contestant), initially hide among the passengers. Their plan is to rob four packed sleeper cars and disappear before the train reaches the next station. Regular passengers include wealthy businessman Baldeo Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya), his daughter Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) and Tulika’s secret boyfriend Amrit (credited by the mononym Lakshya), an elite anti-terrorist commando and exactly the kind of daredevil you’d better not cross in such situations.

Amrit arrives with his best friend and fellow campaigner Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) to convince Tulika to break off an arranged engagement and elope with him. The romance is unashamedly cheesy: when Amrit sneaks into a train bathroom with Tulika to propose (counter-propose?), he opens a ring box that lights up like Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase, while the film’s score relies on the kind of sentimental acoustic guitar picking you usually hear in election ads and pharmaceutical commercials in the flyover states. Like the bloody action that follows, it’s more than a little ridiculous and over-the-top; a more charitable viewer might conclude that Bhat is trying to achieve the same level of unnecessaryness in a different genre key.

While the gang’s middle-aged boss and family man, Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi), waits anxiously at the agreed meeting point, the bandits get to work. They lock the carriages from the rest of the train, block everyone’s phones with a device, and start forcibly separating passengers from their wallets and valuables. The whole thing turns into a bloody brawl (mostly Fani’s fault), and two passengers and a bandit are killed. From there, the bodies pile up, giving each side increasingly gruesome motives for retribution and revenge. The longer the showdown goes on, the more the characters seem to relapse into primitive impulses. The sleeping cars begin to resemble a haunted house.

To KillTo the film’s credit, the bandits, as much as they conform to the stereotype of typical gangsters, are never treated as anonymous. They turn out to be one big extended family: uncles, nephews, brothers and in-laws, all with their own personal reasons for continuing to kill the seemingly immortal Amrit. Admittedly, it’s often hard to keep track of who wants to avenge whom, but that only adds to the film’s over-the-top melodrama, as does the often clunky dialogue. (“This commando’s love has fallen on us like a bomb!” explains Fani.) Even the facial expressions are cartoonish: dirty looks, stares, gnashing and grinding teeth. Both hero and villain end up with a lot of blood on their faces, but their hair remains salon-styled the entire time.

A possible reference point for this could be the cowboy-inspired, often kitschy dacoit genre – basically bandit films – that became a staple of Bollywood from the 1970s onwards. (Kill even makes some allusions to the Western influences of these earlier bandit films.) Another, even more obvious group of references would be the extreme violence of Indonesian action films such as The attack, The Raid 2And The night takes usand classic ’80s American action kitsch. Sylvester Stallone’s dour Rambo gets a name-drop, but Amrit is really a hero in the vein of the shiny, stubborn Schwarzenegger killing machine. He even gets the requisite muscleman angles, but sadly not the hackneyed one-liners.

This is about men becoming monsters, righteous causes and so on, but the symbolism is crude; the violence, however stylised, never represents anything more than itself. Thankfully, Bhat proves himself a capable director of hand-to-hand action – the stabbing, kicking, punching, lunging, stabbing and choking, choreographed in the cramped, rickety interior of the train. The soundtrack is filled with punches, grunts, thuds, slashes and crunches as bodies are hurled between bunks and into vestibules, through sleeping cabin curtains, against cots, fixtures and slamming doors. At one point, Amrit smashes a hapless bandit’s skull with a fire extinguisher until his head is pulverised into a sticky homogeneity reminiscent of canned tomatoes.

As wild and bloody as the film gets, the chaos never feels claustrophobic, although it almost certainly should. In fact, the film’s biggest drawback is not its lack of measurable depth, but its lack of spatial tension. As good as he may be at staging fast-paced fights, Bhat doesn’t show a great grasp of the fundamentals of tension: it’s hard to tell which train carriage we’re in, or how far one group of characters might be from another. The layout, time frame and distance are too vague to create a tangible sense of danger. As a result, KillThe forward momentum of comes entirely from the fact that it continually tries to outdo itself by inventing new, cruder and more sadistic ways to maim and kill within its limited means. Fans of fast, brutal action will have fun, but shouldn’t expect much more.