One of the best pure action films since “The Raid”

“Kill” by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat want You’re supposed to think it’s cheesy. You’re supposed to forget the decidedly generic – if memorably blunt – authoritative title. You’re supposed to chuckle when the square-jawed hero (Lakshya) is introduced with a snappy guitar riff. You’re supposed to roll your eyes when NSG commando Amrit Rathod exchanges silly barbs with his moustachioed best friend Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), and you’re supposed to brace yourself for a typically broad action-love story when the guys crash an engagement party at a Radisson hotel in Jharkhand, where Amrit’s wide-eyed lover (Tanya Maniktala) is being forced into an arranged marriage by her father.

After the festivities, Tulika and her family business board an overnight train to New Delhi to prepare for the wedding. Meanwhile, Amrit and Viresh sneak on board, intent on thwarting this plan. Amrit may not be rich, but maybe there is another way to impress Tulika’s father sufficiently? Enter: 40 bandits with machetes (a family business of a different kind, it turns out), who start stealing from the passengers and even take Tulika’s younger sister hostage. As Amrit and Viresh begin to investigate the Dacotis deeply regret having chosen this particular day for the robbery of the Rajdhani Express, because it seems as if the film surrounding them has few surprises in store.

The joke is on us, and the punch line – delivered when Bhat triumphantly drops the blood-splattered title card 45 minutes into the action – hits with the force of a steaming locomotive. You see, the bandits may have Thought They’ve hijacked the kind of movie where some might get away with their limbs intact, but one of them, a handsome, sociopathic loser named Fani (Raghav Juyal), just has to go out and take things a little too far. Big mistake. Huge. I mean, the vastly outnumbered Amrit and Viresh didn’t even want to fight back at first! But our guys can’t help but freak out when Fani starts killing people.

And that’s exactly how this slightly bloody and seemingly PG-13-free love story erupts into a blatant R-rated massacre that deserves comparison to “The Raid.” Carotid arteries burst like water balloons. Heads are rammed into toilet seats until their faces go flat. One guy is even beaten to death with a hockey stick. The violence isn’t quite as relentless as in a Gareth Evans film, and the carnage isn’t as ridiculously over-the-top. That’s only because this hyper-controlled carnage is only more Grounded and on a human scale, it rolls along, its desperate pathos increasing at the same pace as the number of victims rises.

Kill really lives up to its silly title in the end, but perhaps the most surprising thing about Bhat’s action extravaganza is that it upends expectations without ever straying from the theme. An instant classic of its genre, it’s already slated for an English-language remake by the companies behind John Wick, this pulp fight movie – so tongue-in-cheek and cartoonish when it first leaves the airwaves – is beaten down into something painfully tender by the end.

That raw emotionality is much easier to anticipate when it becomes clear that Bhat’s script has more in common with Snowpiercer than with, say, Die Hard on a Train (and what more could a critic praise a script than to say it’s not as reminiscent of Die Hard as he expected?). Kill wears its socioeconomic tensions lightly, but they seep into every crevice of its story, even when the exquisitely recreated passenger train the story takes place on doesn’t seem to be segregated by class. In fact, the biggest flaw in the film’s excellent fight design is that the specific location where each brawl takes place—which carriage are the characters in?—is never as clear as the choreography of their moves.

What Is What is clear is that Amrit’s position makes him unworthy of Tulika’s love, and that the buffoonish family of bandits who storm the Rajdhani Express are of an even lower caste. Fani, who takes control of the villains through sheer force of will, works at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, where his immense frustration is fed by his unfulfilled ambitions. Fani is young, strong, and somewhat unrealistically skilled with a knife. He is one of the few bandits destined to be the villain in an action movie (right down to his evil grin and casual penchant for misogyny). The rest of his brigade, many or all of whom are members of Fani’s extended family, are basically glorified rednecks who have become thieves only to swindle their way to a decent life. Their domestically manufactured weapons are so unreliable that hostages are a more effective weapon. Most of the men are out of shape. Some are in their 50s and 60s. All of them, except Fani, see it as a shameful night job – more a chance to improve their circumstances than revenge. At least until people start dying and the fight with Amrit becomes an extremely personal matter for both sides.

In Kill, it’s politically telling that the government never fully acknowledges the crisis aboard the Rajdhani Express, and it’s equally telling that Tulika’s father, a business tycoon, is portrayed as the sole reason for it. Bhat lacks the budget for the kind of third-act shenanigans that films like this often resort to to ratchet up the tension (even at the cost of reducing it), but that doesn’t seem to be the only reason the police don’t intervene. Hell, the armed guards riding at the front of the train don’t even learn of the carnage taking place a few carriages behind them until it’s almost too late to help. The problems of the underclass are so completely self-contained that during the wide-angle shots we get of the train gliding through the countryside, all seems fine and dandy; any help Amrit and Viresh hope to find must come from their fellow passengers.

But don’t worry, our guys are quite capable on their own. The choreography was done by action director Oh Se-young, who previously worked as a stuntman for “Snowpiercer” among other things. The fights are a brutal and consistently satisfying depiction of hand-to-hand combat. The individual blows and stabs are a little slower than in the “John Wicks” of this world, but that’s more of an advantage than a fault in a film whose tight sets force the characters to move precisely so they don’t accidentally slaughter a cousin or an innocent passenger.

In such cramped conditions, Amrit’s skills can be even more deadly than in the open, and newcomer Lakshya – a TV pretty boy making his feature film debut – wields a machete far more convincingly than spouting dialogue like “our love is much more powerful than her father.” (The worst groans are reserved for Fani, who at least gets to couch “the commander’s love has fallen on us like a bomb” in the sparkling delirium of a villain gone mad.) Kill finds enough different ways to get stabbed and/or beaten to death that the fights never feel repetitive, with Bhat alternating handheld close-ups with shots from a ceiling-mounted dolly camera to achieve a clear and workable balance between carnage and clarity.

Underpinned by the bold tension of Ketan Sodha’s pulse-quickening score, this dynamic reflects how the film views its sprawling ensemble cast, every member of which we recognise and respond to accordingly, even if character details are kept to an absolute minimum. Amrit’s trajectory is the only one that really matters, and Bhat makes the most of his leading man’s good looks, while Lakshya is perfect in the role of a fresh-faced matinee idol whose features are almost unrecognisable beneath all the blood his character spills on the tracks – a corruption of the soul that “Kill” treats with just the right seriousness for a film in which someone says, “Oh, they’ll get off the train, but only for their funerals.”

Few action films have ever enjoyed subverting their audience’s expectations so much, but Kill is more than just a cheap bait and switch. On the contrary, the story’s painful power comes from the fact that for people like Amrit and Fani, even the simplest and most innocent dreams come at a price they can barely imagine, let alone afford.

Grade: B+

Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions will release “Kill” in theaters on Thursday, July 4th.