The local distributor is promoting this Indian action film as Bollywood John Wick, which is comprehensible shorthand for what the target audience should expect: lots of balletic, well-executed carnage but in an Indian setting; and, for sure, it delivers that in spades, but the Bollywood factor, though somewhat misleading (nobody breaks into song and dance, though the soundtrack does contain some Hindi bangers), makes for a notable difference. In the John Wick films, not to mention most action movies where the body count is high, including Japanese chanbara and Hong Kong kung fu, the bulk of the casualties are treated as no more than bodies to be broken and dismembered. Here, the deaths mean something, and not just those of the nominal good guys. The film’s investment in the emotional outcome of the killings gives the action a frisson of titillation mixed with disgust. 

Our hero is Amrit (Lakshya), an army commando with the requisite wicked skills as a fighter, though we’re introduced to him as the left-behind lover of Tulika (Tanya Manktala), the daughter of an IT oligarch who, frustrated by his daughter’s lack of suitable suitors, has arranged for her to marry another guy. Amrit clandestinely contacts Tulika and they arrange to elope once the engagement party reaches Delhi by overnight train, with Amrit tacitly tagging along in a different coach next to his best bro Viresh (Abhishek Cauhan). Unbenownst to any of them, a large crew of bandits has also booked passage and once the train leaves the station they start robbing the passengers of cash and loot after their psychopathic leader, Fani (Raghav Juyal), buries a machete in a conductor’s skull. Panic sets in and Amrit and Viresh spring into action, taking on the thieves with everything at their disposal within the narrow confines of the train cars. Inevitably, Fani discovers Tulika and her wealthy family and attempts to take them hostage. Amrit’s action brief thus becomes that much more complicated, but the writer-director, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, doesn’t follow through on this premise in ways you might expect. He doubles down on the brutality by giving Amrit a reason to go at the bandits with a fully stimulated rage that gives no quarter. In return—and here’s where the violence is given meaning—the bandits, comprised of interrelated families, turn equally vicious because each person Amrit or Viresh kills is the father, brother, or uncle of somebody on the other side. The fighting increases in boodthirstiness accordingly.

Kill doesn’t rewrite the revenge action genre, but Bhat’s talents as a filmmaker who knows how to use space and time are considerable, and by ignoring much of the aesthetic flair that distinguished the Wick series he creates something new that is terrifyingly visceral in the way people kill and die, because now there is a reason, no matter how frivolous it may seem in terms of conventional cinematic storytelling. I admit to enjoying the relentlessness of the action while also being very unsettled by its emotional toll, exacted to a certain extent by the fact that the bandits, while initially preying on average folk, clearly represent the hungrier classes getting back at the 1-percenters as personified by Amrit’s hoped for in-laws. Sometimes even psychopaths hew closer to your sympathies than the good guys do.  

In Hindi. Opens Nov. 14 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Kill home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 by Dharma Productions PVT, Ltd. & Sikhya Entertainment PVT, Ltd.