Kill: The gore of my dreams!
Ever since Atomic Blonde, I've been hungry for some satisfying bloodshed. Ladies and gentlemen it has been delivered to me.
In the last 30 minutes, I have whispered “majja aayo” to myself at least 30 times. Friends, Kill is the most fun I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. I was screaming my heart out with exhilaration at every head that lolled for the last time inside the invaded-by-daaku train bound for New Delhi.
I rarely indulge in action movies without a lot of skepticism. I might not look it, and I might not be it anymore, but I have been a violent person. I know how powerful hands can be when your body convinces you you’re in danger. Because of this, I also know that power is difficult to sustain. While I love all that John Wick did for the action genre, I also despise the fact that the guy didn’t get tired once mid-fight in all four movies. I hate that his fighting technique doesn’t adapt to his body’s energy.
I felt the first bit of tonight’s exuberance when Charlize Theron did a 10-minute single-take fight scene in Atomic Blonde. She is a spy, she is a savage, and she is a small woman fighting large men. In this scene, if you so choose to view it (it’s gruesome, so at your own discretion), you’ll see her use her body, her knives, her teeth, and a motherfucking hot plate to barely stay alive . Her body changes—she is only just breathing at the end of it, her face changes—gone is the sexy spy using her charms to get information out of people, her blonde hair dripping with blood.
For the longest time, that 10-minute sequence was the gore of my dreams, and now Nikhil Nagesh Bhat has brought me something gorier, better, and has literally taken my breath away.
Kill is obviously not a single-take movie, but because it is shot inside a long-ass train (is there such a thing as a short train?), it might as well be. Oh, how I could kiss Se-yeong Oh, the action choreographer. His expertise seems to be heart-in-your-throat action thrillers inside moving trains. After Snowpiercer’s set, he’s puppeteering Raghav Juyal, my teenage crush from Dance India Dance, in this “ultraviolent Indian train thriller.” Juyal as Fani is getting down and dirty to Se-yeong’s mastery in this movie.
The slaughter dance is crazy and rarely involves well-functioning guns. This is an extermination that starts with a rusty-looking khukuri on the head of an unsuspecting train conductor (? I’m sorry I don’t know much about trains and I only remember the blood and how good it felt) and ends with a motherfucking forearm cramp because the adrenaline rush still hasn’t left my body and I’ve been typing like I am the one running away from a sharp object flying at me one letter at a time.
Juyal makes for a mouth-watering antagonist teetering in and out of psychopathic whims depending on how close or far his well-seasoned dacoit father is. If I am not wrong, it is Fani’s very first dacoit drill, and shit goes from bad to hellish in about a lightning-fast 40 minutes.
Notice how I am talking about the antagonist and not the hero. It’s because by the end of the movie, you will not be able to tell which is which. One minute you want the deliciously handsome Lakshya, playing the extremely skilled army commando Amrit, to kill the family of dacoits on board, and the next minute you want the looting, murdering, and grieving cousins to just end the handsome hunk that’s been taking down their beer-bellied uncles one by one. You gotta pick a side and I apparently picked mine.
I held my breath ever since the 15-minute mark of the movie (Asthmatics, you’ve been warned!) and took a proper breath only when I realized the movie had actually ended. There was not a single unimpressive kill in the movie, and two fucking impressive brand placements that I’ll be thinking about for months! Denver perfumes for men poured down washboard abs full of stab wounds as disinfectant! Chef’s kiss.
Please, please, please, for the love of all gore and blood, go watch Kill and come talk to me about it if we meet in the theatre. I am gonna watch this at least three times.
Good night or good morning or whatever!