Kill
Hotstar
77
Synopsis
Imdb Rating7.6

During a train trip to New Delhi, a pair of commandos face an army of invading bandits.

Cast
Laksh Lalwani
Raghav Juyal
Tanya Maniktala
Abhishek Chauhan
Ashish Vidyarthi
Harsh Chhaya
Adrija Sinha
Meenal Kapoor

Kill

2023 Hindi Movie
Crime Thriller Drama Action
Film Society Sophia College
Film Society Sophia College

Cinema has had a long-standing connection with trains.Ever since the Lumière Brothers’ 45-second film Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat also known as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, left one of the very first film audiences enraptured with this new invention, cinema has coupled train travel. Whether it is characters running to catch trains in Wes Anderson’s Indian Sojourn, The Darjeeling Limited, or Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, there’s something about the overwhelming power of a train that just works on screen. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s extreme action thriller Kill kicks off at the engagement party of Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) where she’s betrothed to a man chosen by her father. However, her heart is stuck on Amrit (Lakshya), an army commando whose combat skills will soon come in pretty handy. When Tulika is whisked off to Delhi by her family, Amrit boards the train, dragging his other commando friend, Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), along in an attempt to derail Tulika’s arranged marriage. Enters Fani (Raghav Juyal), leading a gang of 40 dacoits (a family business of sorts), start robbing the passengers. Things spiral out of control when Fani goes berserk and starts killing people, hampering their main objective, which was to simply rob the commuters and depart on the next platform. After that point, the film becomes a single-location thriller where the audience is as confined as the characters in this fast-paced situation. The former half of the story provides us with almost equal time with both the bandits and the commandos, creating a morally complex scenario and effectively keeping us engrossed. However, after the interval, marked by a 45-minute late title card, there is not much more to the narrative beyond a truckload of bad guys against our lone hero. Raghav Juyal delivers the best performance in the film, playing the charismatic villain. He gets the best lines and delivers them well enough that one might end up feeling more for him than our one-man-army commando Amrit. Despite strong choreography by Rafeh Mahmood, you barely feel the panic or the claustrophobia of being stuck in the situation, since we barely got any time to spend with actual passengers who were held hostage by the robbers. Although the film Kill, acclaimed at TIFF 2023, followed a predictable plot, it still managed to be an entertaining action movie, offering few to no surprises.

11 Aug’24 07:08