Expresso ‘Kill’ Movie Review: Lakshya and Raghav Juyal Deliver a Desi Killing Machine

This Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s fast-and-furious tale is its own creature, which takes care to surround us with familiar elements, even when ratcheting the kill quotient as high as it can go. Complaining about gratuitous violence in ‘Kill’ is pointless, as the film consists entirely of sequences oozing with an overwhelming degree of blood-and-gore, a quantum we haven’t seen in Hindi cinema. It's a no-holds-barred, brutal pro-max film that targets the jugular and everywhere else, adhering to genre conventions from start to finish: slash, bang, thud, rinse, repeat.

Two commandos up against a bunch of bandits who invade a train going from Ranchi to Delhi — is basically an excuse for the action director and the fight choreographer to conjure up the many ways to kill a man. Those who are fans of genre movies, and have been watching the South Koreans show us how it is done Train To Busan’, ‘Snowpiercer’, will find the desi ‘Kill’ derivative. The good guys are patriotic Army commandos, the bad guys are modern day versions of the good old dakus, there is romance in the air, the young lovers stealing moments in the crowd, and the overweight cops, as always, bring up the rear.

A film which calls itself ‘Kill’ allows for no nuance. We know, going in, that there will be blood. Will it make us wince in horror, and close our eyes against the relentlessness of it all? On that score, I can tell you that while I did the wincing and closing-the-eyes bit, I also succumbed to a moment or two of visceral delight at seeing the bad guys get theirs, as well as marveling at the action experts who made each of these kills different, using different parts of the train and different methods of killing to the hilt. There’s also an excuse for all the carnage in the slender storyline which has just enough weight to carry all this slashing-and-shooting: one of the commandos.

The posse of dakus is led by a son-and-father duo and once the bets are off, triggered by a killing which feels even more gratuitous than the others, it’s a free-for-all, and the body count piles in grisly, grotesque ways. The things that make this film distinctively desi also distract from the main task: the romantic bits between Amrit and Tulika are banal but mercifully brief, as Lakshya is much better at snarling-and-killing than canoodling. The insistence on making the bad guys human with tears when they find their compatriots twisted in shapes no living being can pull off, boo hoo) comes off more as a digression. Making Fani a baddie who switches easily between funny-and-vicious is also a trope, riffing off Bollywood dialogues and coming up with his own. Juyal is the most effective part of this film: he makes us enjoy him being a terrible human being.

The film itself makes itself desi because of all its references, from ‘DDLJ’ can there be a pair of lovers on a train which doesn’t remind us of that iconic love-story? to ‘QSQT’ heavy-handed Thakur dads are clearly still in vogue, to the hero’s name which is that of a film in which our boys from the Army won over an enemy, to the old ‘dhanda’ of ‘chori-chakaari’ and ‘firauti’? But it’s also savage enough to really raise the stakes– it doesn’t pussy foot about trying to save all the main characters and sacrifice the ‘sidies’– which then gives Amrit reason to rampage the way he does.

Kill, produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions and Guneet Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment, tells the story of a soldier, played by Lakshya, who turns a train into a bloodbath as Raghav Juyal’s character kidnaps his girlfriend, played by Tanya Maniktala, on a train.

Amrit is not your everyday soldier; he transforms into a ruthless killing machine, unleashing brutal vengeance on the goons who attack the train. Directed by Nikhil Bhat, who earlier helmed Apurva and Brij Mohan Pyare Amar Rahe, Kill, months before its upcoming release on July 5, has been creating buzz internationally, with filmmaker-actor Anurag Kashyap claiming.

Kill premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023. The film earned a spot among the ten selected films for screening at the festival. It is also one of the first Indian films whose distribution rights have been acquired by Lionsgate for North America and the UK. Not all films that travel the film festival circuit end up with a theatrical release and commercial success. The protagonist, as seen in the trailer, is so merciless that even the villain (Raghav) ends up saying, “Who kills like this?” But Nikhil is not scared of the criticism that might follow the release of the film. Kill, is an extremely violent film, so if it gets criticised for violence, it’s almost like a horror film being criticised for scaring people.Nikhil stresses that despite Kill being an action film with gore and violence, at its heart it’s a very emotional film.