Kill

Kill follows army commando Amrit (Lakshya), who boards a train bound for New Delhi to meet up with his lover Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) and attempt to derail her forced marriage to another man. However, what should have been an ordinary commute quickly becomes a nightmare, as several carriages on the train are hijacked by bandits, led by the sadistic and ruthless Fani (Raghav Juyal). With the odds stacked against him and innocent lives in danger, Amrit, as well as his friend and fellow commando Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), must fight to stop the bandits and ensure the train arrives at New Delhi safely.

It’s a pretty paper-thin plot, but Kill isn’t interested in telling a compelling story as much as it’s excited about violence, something it provides in spades. “Kill” is definitely the imperative word here, as the film indulges and luxuriates in its fight scenes, with several grisly and creative dispatches accentuated by sickening sound design, buckets of blood and claustrophobic cinematography that heightens the tension and plays off the setting well.

However, Kill’s passion for, well, killing is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While its fight scenes are very well done, the movie’s enthusiasm for them impacts its pacing, drawing out proceedings in a way that actively gets in the way of the tense atmosphere it tries to create. The middle section does feel somewhat repetitive – Amrit and Viresh brutalise some bandits, then get injured themselves, everyone retreats and the cycle repeats – and the movie quickly overstays its welcome, stretching the audience’s suspension of disbelief to breaking point and causing the production as a whole to lean more towards the absurd than the adrenaline-fuelled thrill ride it wants to be.

There are many things one could say about Kill as a film, but it could never be accused of false advertising. Kill is what it is and killing is what it does, with great enthusiasm and heaps of macabre passion, but that same energy interferes with the effectiveness of the piece on a structural level and blunts the tone set by the great camera work and special effects. Still, despite its pacing problems Kill manages to be a fairly successful and uncomplicated action showcase, and could be a fun 105 minutes for audiences willing to look past the structural problems, embrace the occasional daftness and drink in the gory visuals.

Umar Ali

Kill is released on 5^th July 2024.

Watch the trailer for Kill here: