The first shot fired in Indian Hindi-language action thriller Kill isn’t unleashed with deadly intent – it’s at a party celebrating the arranged engagement of Tulika (Tanya Maniktala). Unfortunately, Tulika has her heart set on Amrit (played with requisite smoulder by mononymic hunk Lakshya) and why wouldn’t she? He’s a strapping, handsome lad, who, as an army commando, turns out to have fighting skills that will come in pretty handy.
When the violence gets going, after a commendably moderate build up, there’s actually a refreshing lack of gunplay; the 40-odd bandits robbing the sleeper train on which Tulika and Amrit find themselves travelling favour blades and blunt-force trauma over bullets, with an array of knives, machetes and lump hammers pressed into service as the baddies separate the innocent passengers from their valuables. Tulika’s family are also on board, providing plenty of additional potential high-stakes hostages, and, in a neat twist, many of the bandits are themselves related to each other, meaning the good guys’ retaliation has emotional stakes for the villains, rather than the usual action movie setup where the bad guys couldn’t care less about their colleagues getting wiped out.
Once onboard the train, Kill becomes a single-location thriller, and director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat makes great use of said location. One sequence sees sleeper compartment curtains put to highly innovative use, while a fire extinguisher is handily employed as the opposite of safety equipment. It’s a film to see in the cinema with an engaged audience if you can (the screening I went to was full of audible gasps and groans), with the multitude of on-screen killings very much designed to elicit reactions; the sound designers have lots of fun playing around with an array of crunches, cracks, squelches and spatter effects.
The villains are the sort you want to boo and hiss, panto-style; in truth, none of the characters are particularly complex, nor is there all that much to the plot, beyond good guys and bad guys smashing each other to pieces, but that’s a feature rather than a problem. Kill’s objectives are achieved with an energy and enthusiasm that make it a tasty piece of action cinema which doesn’t pull its punches; it’s finger-cracking good.