Making headlines for being one of the most violent films to come out of India, Kill has a premise that will sound a lot like a Liam Neeson thriller, but ends up giving John Wick a run for his money. Lakshya stars as Amrit, an army commando who boards a train to New Delhi to intervene in the arranged marriage of his true love Tulika (Tanya Maniktala). However, his plan is scuppered by a gang of thieves boarding the train with the intention to rob it. Amrit embarks on a one-man crusade to stop the thieves, dispatching them by any means necessary.
This is the kind of set up that would have been big box office thirty years ago. Taking the Die Hard formula, popping it on a train, and throwing a lot of blood at the screen, there is a relentless nature to Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s film that will make fans of hardcore action salivate. Lakshya becomes a tought, unstoppable killing machine, offing baddies with toilet seats, knives, sliding doors, and anything that comes to hand.
Necks are broken and eyes stabbed, with every blow executed with maximum enthusiasm by all involved. Despite a slightly disturbing early scene that kicks off the violence, the romantic moments are more pauses than plot points. It’s almost as if there needs to be regular justifications for this bloodshed, but anyone buying a ticket to a movie called Kill shouldn’t be clutching their pearls at the sight of gore.
The star of the show is the choreography, which allow for complex combat in tight spaces. Se-yeong Oh, the fight choreographer for 2012’s Snowpiercer, crafts the action for this movie, so it’s no surprise that a mundane commuter train should so easily become a narrow labyrinth of death. Kill is likely to become a cult classic in the vein of The Raid, covering up certain narrative holes with a visual slickness most Hollywood productions could only dream of.
• Kill is in cinemas from 5th July