And the award for mostest violentest movie of 2024 goes to Kill (now streaming on Hulu), a gratuitously punchy-stabby-slashy-headbutty-brainsplattery fightfest in the Thai or Wuxia tradition, except it’s from India, a country we usually associate with other film genres. In other words, there’s no song-and-dance in this flick, Jones. Here’s the gimmick: The action is confined wholly to the tight quarters of a moving train – and only one bullet is fired throughout the entire movie, so bloodshed is limited to the use of fists, sickles, daggers, those mini-machete things, hammers and one meat cleaver. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat directs the movie within an inch of everyone’s lives, exactly as you’d expect from a movie thus titled.
KILL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Amrit Rashod (Laksh Lawani, a.k.a. Lakshya) is a commando with the Indian National Security Guard, fresh from a mission that surely involved killing a lot of people. This isn’t stated or even implied, but I’m reading it that way, especially after watching the rest of the movie. He turns on his phone and is greeted with a series of distressing messages from his girlfriend Tulika Singh (Tanya Maniktala): her father, a rich and powerful businessman, has arranged her engagement to another dude. Does the other dude know that her OG BF is an NSG BMF? Probably not, because if he did, he might back off; then again, Tulika’s father isn’t the type of guy who takes “no” for an answer, unless he’s in an OTT out-of-control life-and-death situation where influence has no sway. But we’re not to that point yet.
The entire Singh family – including Tulika’s teenage sister, whose birth certificate reads Ahaana (Adrija Sinha), but for the movie’s purposes should say Kidnapbait – boards an overnight train, and Amrit and his commando pal Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) snag a couple of tickets, hoping to intervene in the engagement and, I dunno, steal Tulika away so she and Amrit can elope, I guess? Maybe I lost the plot a bit amidst my anticipatory glee for impending bloodthirsty violence. Coincidentally, a smug little shit named Fani (Raghav Juyal) and his extended family of bandits – father, cousins, siblings, uncles, brothers-in-law, etc., all male – are also on the train, planning to point pointy things at passengers, take wallets and valuables, and hop off. It’ll be like shooting candy in a baby barrel!
IF ONLY, RIGHT? Amrit, already tangled in the snaky clingy tendrils of love, soon finds himself in the middle of a precarious endeavor requiring the consistent use of his fists as instruments of pain. Fani and cohorts quickly learn that the influential Singh family is aboard, and realize their payday might be bigger than anticipated, but. You know what that “but” is. But, they just effed with the wrong family with a daughter with an OG BF NSG BMF. Amrit socks and elbows and kneebones his way through 36 thugs – he counted! – including one tracksuited bruiser, who wouldn’t exist if Guy Ritchie’s parents had never met. Oddly, Amrit has yet to do the thing in the title of the movie. As the guy once said, curious. But this might just be one of those Push Him Too Hard And You Will Pay kind of situations. Which is exactly what happens. And then, 45 minutes into the movie, the title card slams in front of us: KILL. Oh boy.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Best moving-train action since Snowpiercer. Now cross that with The Raid and the Crazy 88s sequence from Kill Bill, maybe throw in some Woo-ish non-gun-fu, and you’ve got all the stuff that Kill wants to be.
Performance Worth Watching: Although the movie occasionally pauses for its cast to emote – which differentiates Kill from most American chopsockies – performances by actual actors are secondary here, maybe even tertiary or, like, twelfthieary. So let’s just give this nod to Lakshya for convincingly playing a character who shrugs off peen-hammers to the skull and crowbars to the knees like he’s made of rubber.
Memorable Dialogue: OF COURSE a movie called Kill is all about death death death – even during a lovers’ exchange:
Amrit: Aren’t you dying to be with me?
Tulika: Why do I need to die to be with you?
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The question always occurs to me in movies like this: Considering all the mayhem that’s playing out, why don’t they stop the train, Bart? WHY DON’T THEY STOP THE TRAIN? (Or the semi-truck when Neo or Dom Toretto hand-to-hands it on top of the trailer, or the stagecoach when the white hats cling to the roof while socking the black hats?) Quick answer: Because it’s more fun this way.
It’s also sort of fun how Bhat and co-screenwriter Ayesha Syed put in the effort to make the bad guys more than just faceless thugs – we’re subject to a couple of amusing moments where they pause to mourn their dead, weeping and blubbering, completely clueless to the boiling vat of hypocrisy in which they live, where they don’t bat an eye when they kill someone else, but the death of one of their own is tragic. Such are the ethics of organized thuggery, I guess. Bhat sows a little dark humor into Kill, and it’s a necessary maneuver considering how gleefully ultraviolet the action can be, and how grotesque the Fani character can be, grinning as he shows the contents of his putrid soul, committing acts of merciless slaughter against helpless women and children.
I don’t know if Kill ever truly balances out its nastiness – does watching Amrit smash the literal brains out of a bad guy with the butt of a fire extinguisher make us feel better? Eh, I dunno – but maybe you can stretch things enough to say the depiction of gruesome violence is itself a statement against it. Actually, no, I don’t buy that line of reasoning. Bhat relishes in the mayhem, and I guess it’s “playful” enough most of the time to be more entertaining than off-putting. Sure, he’s above-average in the art and craft of fight choreography, making the most of the film’s confined spaces, inspired in part by old Jackie Chan pictures and more insidious poker-faced shit like Rambo (if he didn’t carry a gun, and yes, feel free to chuckle at such a ridiculous notion) or even blood-and-guts horror films. Either way, your mileage may vary.
Our Call: Apparently I’m enough of a sicko to appreciate the skill it takes to stage and execute a movie like Kill more than I’m taken aback by instances of men getting their heads smashed into toilet bowls and such. I guess the movie satisfies the primal urge to see evil people die in horrific fashion, even though we all know rehabilitation always always trumps revenge – in theory, anyway. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
