‘Kill’ movie review: Lakshya rampages in propulsive bloodfest

The tide has finally turned at Dharma Productions’ action department. Some months ago they gave us Yodha, with Sidharth Malhotra thwacking hijackers on a juddering plane. By comparison, their latest, Kill, featuring newcomer Lakshya in the leading role, is a more grounded effort: a 105-minute brawl on a moving train. If the film turns a profit and a sequel is announced — an English-language remake is already in the works — I would strongly advise the makers not to scale up but to scale down. Kill 2 should ideally take place on an autorickshaw in the Mumbai rains, a real bloodbath.

Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat trims more fat than I thought was possible from a Dharma screenplay; Sikhya Entertainment, a far-hipper banner with an international outlook, is their co-producer on the film and was likely the countervailing influence. Amrit (Lakshya), an NSG commando, is unwinding from a recent assignment when a new crisis presents itself: his girlfriend, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), is getting engaged to someone else. The match has been made against her will, at the behest of Tulika’s wealthy, influential father (Harsh Chhaya). With just a day to go, Amrit, a man of instant, indefatigable action, turns up in Ranchi to spirit Tulika out of the function. She declines — “Abort mission,” Amrit quickly alerts his tag-along army buddy, Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) — promising to reconvene in Delhi and elope on safer ground.

The following day, Tulika and her family board an overnight train to Delhi. Amrit shadows them on the journey, proposing to his beloved in the washroom (“the commode smells nice”) before hunkering down with Viresh in a different coach. Also aboard is a gang of raggedy robbers, led by the lusty, psychotic Fani (Raghav Juyal). They seal off four compartments and jam off the signal — the train, thus, can barrel on unimpeded as they scare and loot the passengers. All of this takes about 15 minutes to set up. Then the fighting starts.

Once Kill gets down to business, it explodes. This is one of the gnarliest Hindi action films set to hit theatres in a long, long while. The action is slick, frantic, propulsive and all the other adjectives you can lavish on a Bollywood film with raw fight choreography and unembarrassing CGI. The sealed-off compartments of an Indian passenger train become the perfect sandbox for blood-soaked mayhem. Action directors Se-Yeong Oh and Parvez Sheikh have worked on expansive productions — War, Tiger 3 — but they are no less inventive in these cramped spaces (Se-Yeong, in fact, did the Korean unit stunts on Snowpiercer). The drapes of an AC sleeper coach are refurbished as death traps; there’s a steady stream of clever decoys; and it’s rare to see a Hindi action film composed almost entirely of melee attacks (the robbers carry a delicious inventory of curved knives).

Kill premiered at the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023. The promos had suggested Indian Die Hard on a train, although Bhat — directing his first true-blue action film — also reimagines this elementary setup as a Neo-Western. It soon emerges, for instance, that the thieves are blood relatives; grief flows on both sides, catapulting the drama into a macabre waltz of revenge. Ketan Sodha’s music has distinct Western inflections. I also enjoyed how Fani keeps yelling the full name of Tulika’s father — “Baldev Singh Thakur” — like marking out his nemesis in a 1960s daku movie.

Lakshya, heavily hyped as Hindi cinema’s new ‘killing machine’, is sweaty, strong and seething. The young actor spurns the athleticism of a Tiger Shroff or Vidyut Jammwal, opting instead for a more centred, abrasive fighting style. What he lacks, perhaps, is a gift of the gab: No “Yippee-Ki-Yay, mother***” or “I have come to chew bubble gum and kick ass”, just a lot of grunts and pithy phrases. The wisecracks mostly flow from Juyal, who is enjoyably loose-limbed and rapacious as the wild-eyed Fani.

As a furious Amrit rampages to and fro on this train of death, beheading, braining and setting human heads on fire, one wonders if Kill is the kind of recruitment ad the armed forces are expecting Bollywood to produce. This is a tremendously gory genre piece, fastidiously satisfying its own (and the audience’s) bloodlust. By a funny coincidence, Kill is releasingin the 20th year of Farhan Akhtar’s sophomore film, which approached the soldier narrative as a gentle coming-of-age. But that was in 2004: a different era, a different Lakshya.