9/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars

Premiering at TIFF Midnight Madness, writer/director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill finally brings Bollywood into conversations with films like The Raid and John Wick. Sporting impressive stunt choreography, plenty of gnarly kills, and a badass action hero, Kill is a brutally stylized 115 minutes of tears and carnage.

Amrit, a special forces commando played by Lakshya Lalwani in his debut film role, hops on a train to prevent his girlfriend, Tulika (Tanya Maliktala), from being arranged to marry a wealthier man. However, a simple train ride for love turns into high-stakes chaos when armed bandits, led by the charismatically sociopathic Fani (Raghav Juyal), attempt to rob the train. The film follows two main plotlines: Amrit’s perspective and Fani’s perspective. Amrit’s romance with Tulika is quite wooden, and her character seems to have been written more as a plot device than an actual character. Their dramatic scenes together, coupled with incredibly cliche guitar music, garnered a lot of laughs from the midnight crowd.

On the other hand, Fani’s storyline is entertainingly enthralling. Similar to the themes of The Raid, a slow power struggle washes over the bandits as they realize that their robbery is not what they expected. Raghav Juyal shines as the film’s cold-blooded villain, clearly having fun with Bhat’s screenplay. Juyal and Lalwani are tremendous opposing forces, and the scenes they share are the film’s best. The film’s melodrama can be very hit-or-miss and is paced quite poorly, but once the title card drops, the film improves drastically.

Coordinated by Korean and Indian action choreographers Se-young Oh and Parvez Shaikh, who previously choreographed the 2019 Bollywood action film War, the film’s stuntwork is absolutely incredible. The entire film is fluidly choreographed close-quarters action, with Bhat shooting the action with lots of extremely wide lenses, tightly composed frames, and dynamic camera movements. The wideness of the frames gives the action lots of room to breathe, similar to last year’s Bullet Train by David Leitch. Also similar to Bullet Train, Kill is insanely violent. After the midway point, Kill becomes a total bloodbath where Lalwani goes from John Wick to Michael Myers.

The movie sounds like the sound engineer went to his nearest butcher shop and left a microphone inside, as the cacophony of bones cracking, joints snapping, and meat tearing disgustingly enhances the audiovisual experience of the film. The midnight crowd was oohing at all the gnarly violence, and several cheers rang out as Lalwani shredded henchmen like tissue paper. Despite the obvious comparisons to Gareth Evans’ The Raid, the film’s reliance on melee weaponry instead of guns is more reminiscent of Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us, which producer Karan Johar mentioned during the Q&A. Kill wears its influences from preceding action films like John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Enter The Dragon, and The Raid on its sleeve, but it manages to stay original and inventive.

Looking around the packed crowd, many Desi people, myself included, showed up for this Bollywood world premiere, which was heartwarming. It was fantastic for Bollywood to be represented in this new wave of action cinema, and Lakshya Lalwani has a promising future as an action star. Despite a somewhat cookie-cutter screenplay, Kill is a total thrill ride of nonstop carnage and action and deserves to be seen when it releases internationally.

TIFF 2023 | Movie Review: "KILL" Slays At TIFF Midnight Madness