We are almost halfway through the Indian action extravaganza “Kill” before the title card slams onscreen, by which point its simple imperative — and the film’s entire raison d’être — has been obeyed so many times it’s essentially redundant. Much like the movie’s English subtitles: The dialogue might be in Hindi, but the language of blood and bones is universal.
Speaking it fluently is Amrit (Lakshya), a hunky military commando who has followed his childhood sweetie, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), onto an express train to New Delhi in the hope of rescuing her from an arranged marriage. The lovebirds’ quivering reunion, however, is rudely interrupted by a horde of bandits armed with knives and hammers. What they lack in sophistication, they more than make up for in enthusiasm as they set about robbing the terrified passengers. Can Amrit and his military buddy (Abhishek Chauhan) stop them? Will the lead villain (a seductively menacing Raghav Juyal) upstage our baby-faced hero? How many objects can be inserted into a human head?
To answer these questions, the writer and director, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, leaps into fifth gear and rarely downshifts. As Amrit arguably does more damage than the zombies in “Train to Busan” (2016), the cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, working with the action specialists Parvez Shaikh and Se-yeong Oh, meticulously captures near-continuous martial-arts sequences of balletic brutality. Exhausted as the actors appear, spare a thought for the film’s Foley artists, whose repertoire of squishy, crunchy and splattery sound effects must have been sorely taxed.
Manipulative to the max (one upsetting murder is almost pornographically protracted), “Kill” is dizzyingly impressive and punishingly vicious. In the press notes, the director tells us that he once slept through a similar attack by armed train robbers. No one is sleeping through this one.
Kill
Rated R for 52 varieties of knife wound, one weaponized bathroom fixture and several ugly sweater vests. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.