Writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s single-location actioner marks a very welcome indulgence of the time-tested “Die Hard on a Blank” trope. This film’s brutal action is entirely restricted to a moving New Dehil-bound train, the setting effectively acting as a version of Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza, only tipped on its side and sent rocketing through the Indian countryside. And it makes for one hell of a ride.
Kill wastes absolutely no time putting its wheels in motion. The train literally leaves the station within barely five minutes of screen time, carrying with it our dashing hero, Amrit (Lakshya), his beautiful bride-to-be, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), and his faithful right-hand man, Viresh (Abhishek Cauhan). Barely five more minutes have passed when a gang of bandits emerge from the throngs of passengers and being violently robbing everyone in sight.
It’s an extremely smart setup for a thriller. The robbery takes place during a two-hour stretch with no scheduled stops and the bad guys have jammed the phones and cut the emergency breaks, so there’s no chance of escape or anyone coming to the rescue. Anyone, that is, apart from the two reasonably pissed-off army commandos in Coach B1.
Amrit and Viresh quickly spring into action, delivering a rapid flurry of high kicks and spinning elbows that quickly leave the bandits wishing they’d waited for the next train. The way Amrit switches from the doe-eyed boy who was gazing so lovingly at Tulika to a glowering mountain of muscles and bad intentions is like a magic trick. His mustachioed friend also proves to have a much greater capacity for violence than his small stature and cozy sweaters would suggest.
The action is kinetic and chaotic as bodies are sent bouncing off seats, windows, floors, and ceilings. Bhat manages to capture the action clearly enough that we always know what’s going on, while still immersing us in the packed-in panic of the moment. From one tumble to the next, we might lose track of which end of the train is which and what direction the characters are moving in, but we always know where a punch came from and who just got their jaw broken. And through it all, the inexhaustible energy of the action is matched by a thunderous soundtrack that hurls rock guitars, electronic beats, and guttural chanting into the mix.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and Amrit continually finds fresh ways to turn the limited resources available to him, from fire extinguishers to bedsheets, into deadly weapons. He and Viresh also avail themselves of the many, many knives that the bandits have brought on board, and the film is just as imaginative with how it puts these to use. In classic action-movie fashion, Kill also provides them with an unthinkably large man to face off against: a tracksuit-wearing giant named Siddhi (Parth Tiwari), whose punches look like they could splinter redwoods.
We always know exactly where Kill is headed. The rails are set when the bandits’ suavely psychotic leader, Fani (Raghav Juyal), first lays eyes on Tulika. It’s clear that Amrit is going to have to battle his way through carriage after carriage of bad guys to rescue her, with his final stop most likely being a bloody showdown with Fani himself. But Kill still continually finds clever ways to defy our expectations through the particular placement of dramatic beats, surprising shifts in tone, and even just the way it keeps flipping the geography of the action.
At a pivotal moment in the plot, which arrives at the most unexpected time, Amrit is finally pushed too far. Until then, he and Viresh have been doing their best not to kill anyone while fighting the bandits, but now Armit is in full berserker mode, tearing through each new opponent and striking pure terror into every onlooker. Lakshya sells this beastly transformation with aplomb, and this more gruesome brand of action is as inventively devised and clearly realized as the comparatively softer-hitting version that came before.
It also highlights another clever little choice that Kill makes. The bandit clan is mostly made up of families, so every faceless goon that Amrit eviscerates is also the father, brother, or cousin of someone else on the train. The scenes that linger on their horrified reactions to the carnage Amrit leaves in his wake are deftly handled, allowing the film to both delight in its visceral action and count the human costs of all those severed arteries. It’s a cliché at this point to talk about violence and revenge in terms of cycles, but Kill essentially gives this idea physical form—a locked box rolling around a set track, every blow struck echoing along its entire length, every kill making the world a little bit bloodier for everyone that’s left behind.
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