Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. We wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing coverage of TIFF 2023, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Trains and cinematic violence go together like peanut butter and chocolate, and Hollywood has mined this specific flavor enhancement for decades – hell, train robberies were the subjects of the one of the first American narrative films, after all – which is why Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s KILL, an Indian Under Siege 2: Dark Territory as if it were led by a brooding Dolph Lundgren, is so refreshing. It takes every detail of the mainstream American train movie and adds its own special blend of spice to the mixture, in satisfying ways both traditionally (wall-to-wall blood splatter) and unconventionally (its application of Bollywood-style melodramatics). For all of those let down by the promise of something like Bullet Train, KILL gives you exactly what you want for two solid hours, only pausing to soak in the ridiculous dramatics that accompany every excellently-choreographed action sequence. At two-plus hours, it’s a bit bloated – and one definitely feels that water weight when sitting in a theater chair physically, given the bladder-busting nature of it – but it moves fast enough (and is goofy enough) to have something compelling just around the next turn.
At first blush, it may seem like KILL has one of those admirably simple Raid-like premises: An overnight train to New Delhi, two supercommandos from the Indian Army, and 40 members of a train-robbing crime gang. If you’re already starting to imagine the DOOM soundtrack, you’re right on the money, but it’s a little more complicated than it might seem. One of these supercommandos, Amrit (Lakshya, who in profile quite literally resembles the black-and-white Chad meme with his chiseled jaw), is on his way to prevent Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), the woman that he loves, from the arranged marriage that awaits her at their destination. She and her extended family – including her father, a wealthy businessman – are in one of the first class cars, and she’s eagerly awaiting their elopement, so that she can finally marry Amrit. The only thing standing it in their way, it seems, is time, at least until the gang boards the train.
When one describes a crime family, usually it means that there’s a central core of relations that governs a whole body of employed yet unrelated goons to carry out dirty work. Not here: The 40-something men who board the train are all direct relatives, and what was supposed to be a simple robbery becomes a blood feud with Amrit’s brother in arms kills one of the elder statesmen in self-defense. It gets even worse when Fani (Raghav Juyal), the boss’s psychopathic kid, discovers Tulika and her family, and decides to take all of them hostage. Cue John Wick levels of revenge-centric motivation, with an added level of psychopathy: Amrit is driven to the edge of sanity by Fani’s actions, and unleashes the dogs of war, crying both big fat tears and havoc along the way. This is where the melodrama emerges: Characters don’t simply die, they are painstakingly killed and mourned with an operatic thunder, in ways both sad and deeply, deeply amusing. The latter is best represented in the group action sequences: The blood relations that comprise the gang’s make-up ensure that, if this were a Hollywood production, SAG cards would have been handed out like craft service muffins, as every single death involving what would be a typically anonymous extra is accompanied by a panicked shout of their name by a bereaved fellow goon.
This compliments the mean streak that runs through KILL very well, with aspects of Amrit’s strategy for handling the gang approaching Saw levels of emotional terrorism and the fights themselves being of a brutal enough nature that your average Indonesian action director would have to tip their cap. Bhat’s all about using the limited amount of space in a train car – and the fact that everyone’s using knives or bats or shitty homemade guns – to contort his actors into frenetic and claustrophobic close-quarters hand-to-hand combat, with practical and digital blood frequently trading places depending on the scenario (though he uses pooled digital blood as opposed to splatter, which is much more visceral). It’s ferocious and gory as shit, with heads getting stabbed, smashed, splattered, and caved in. And much like a zombie movie, the headshot is the only way one can really take another out of the game permanently, as these dudes can take levels of punishment far beyond what is reasonable.
But KILL is often in on the joke of how oddly this level of violence pairs up with the naked sentimentality it has, and the entire film never manages to fully turn one’s smile into a frown. For Christ’s sake, this is a movie where the hero uses cologne to disinfect his wounds, which is possibly the funniest twist on the “dump vodka on that cut and call it a day” cliche, and if you can roll with that, KILL will probably delight you to no end.