Film Review - Kill
Images courtesy of Kismet Movies.
Kill is exactly what it says on the tin. A somewhat entertaining action kill-fest, with an unfortunately undercooked central thesis that just isn't formally supported by the filmmaking at hand. Following an extremely physically proficient commando in the Indian Army travelling on a train bound for New Delhi, Amrit (Lakshya Lalwani in a debut role) engages in a brutal laying down of the law as he protects the passengers of the train, including his lover, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), from an extended family of bandits.
Dipping a toe into class commentary, the extended family of low-income bandits who make up Kill’s villains seek to exploit Tulika’s father, a wealthy railway board member (Harsh Chhaya) onboard the train. The heroes are the well-off military commandos protecting Tulika’s father as well as the rest of the train's passengers.This is as far as the film's commentary goes. The presence of the board member on the train is largely trivial and not the basis of any nuanced class commentary, the potential to explore the unique class systems on board a New Delhi-bound train is not utilised, and the gratuitous depravity the film exhibits through its action scenes is a superfluous message on how ‘demonic’ one gets when they no longer have anything to lose.
Kill delivers a nuanced depiction of the comradery between the bandits, the film frequently breaking up action scenes with moments of the bandits crying and mourning their fallen. This is supplemented by scenes of Amrit relishing in violent, brutal slaughter of the bandits - a scene late in the film utilises a play on Hindi words to describe Amrit’s mentality: a character is concerned about whether Amrit is a "rakshak" ("protector") or a "rakshas" ("demon"), two similar sounding words with different meanings, but only a razor-thin line between them in Indian studio cinema”. These themes are immediate and ostensibly solid, but I personally need there to be a bit more meat on the bones, visually if nothing else, when it comes to this messaging. As it is, the film takes pleasure in these brutal action scenes, which are often fun to watch, but I think the film’s effort at having the audience feel complicit in Amrit’s massacre largely falls on deaf ears. I think this complicity angle only works if the action is significantly more well-shot and visually interesting than it is, in this department I felt it just wasn’t there.
I love train movies. The inherent mechanical trajectory and facade of a locomotive and the linear and segmented manner in which the characters inside must traverse it lends itself to a brilliant premise, and this was my main draw for Kill. From the country of India where passenger train travel is highly idiosyncratic - trains function as accommodation for the duration of the often very long journeys - there is obvious potential for an action film set on one. Unfortunately, the camera never utilises the geometry of the parameters of the train very effectively, which at any given moment is anywhere between 4 to 20 carriages long, and the ways in which characters can traverse the train in differently quickly had me lose track of the physical dynamics of an action scene. It does a decent enough job of situating the players of a given moment - I enjoyed a scene in which one of the bandits, a 6 foot-plus brawler of a man, continues to menace Amrit down the entire length of a carriage, and certain set dressing such as a bloody handprint on a mirror are solid reminders of which carriage we’re in - but the potential for it to go harder in these respects is lost. Many have cited Oldboy’s infamous hallway scene as an influence on the close-quarters combat in the linear, narrow space of the train, but Oldboy’s use of a two-dimensional, horizontal plane through which to situate the combat could’ve worked wonders here. I hate to criticise a film by just describing a different film but action films are by their very nature derivative, and there’s no shame in borrowing further, especially in an industry like Bollywood that is often far more cinematographically interesting than this.
Should you watch Kill? I can understand why many would get a kick out of this, to its credit it’s never downright bad, maintaining a sturdy pace throughout, and I think it has a lot of emotional promise - I quite enjoyed the relationship between Amrit and Tulika, whose scenes together are the most positively and typically Bollywood the film gets. And, of course, if you like the Violence! Blood! and Guts! of a John Wick clone then your desires will be met in spades here (look out for a rather neat lighter scene!). Unfortunately it never quite escapes the reductive shackles that often befall social commentary aspects of Bollywood productions - a shame given how ripe the film’s premise is for exploration into class conflict - and does little to counterweight this shallowness with its high-fidelity action filmmaking that lacks significant finesse.
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Kill is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 4th of July. For tickets and more info, click here.