Burden Of Reviews: ‘Kill’ Is A Case Of Overkill, Or Is There More We Miss?

Gore can be interesting if packaged well. The choice of the word interesting is deliberate. A movie can pique your curiosity, keep you engaged but may not be a totally enjoyable experience. Kill comes in that category. It’s interesting because it is uninhibitedly violent, and unremitting while at it unlike most movies in that genre. But…

The ‘but’ comes from certain confusion. If you are late to catch a movie and have tried to stay informed by going through reviews of top critics, it can sometimes lead to predisposition about it. When you watch it, the opinion of others may weigh in and influence your judgement. For this writer, that was the case.

Kill opened mostly to rave reviews.

…This tasty piece of action cinema provides crunches, squelches and spatter effects as the good guys and bad guys delightfully smash each other to pieces, wrote reviewer Catherine Bray in the Guardian.

…Kill is likely to become a cult classic in the vein of The Raid, covering up certain narrative holes with a visual slickness most Hollywood productions could only dream of, remarked Victoria Luxford in cityam.com.

…thanks to the movie’s skillfully executed and relentless action and a couple of major twists, Kill largely overcomes its few hurdles to be an absolute thrill ride, said Grant Hermanns in his review on screenrant.com.

…This is an absolute must-watch for all fans of action and otherwise. However, reiterating the point made earlier, you would need to steer clear of it if you can’t digest gore, wrote Zinia Bandyopadhyay, in her review in indiatoday.com.

Yes, it’s not a movie for the faint-hearted. It’s an unapologetically violent movie. But the handling of violence is taut. If you can utter gore and finesse in the same breath, Kill is where you can use it. To execute violence of this scale in a cramped train without a mess-up is a remarkable work of skill and inventiveness. It’s the novelty factor in the movie, and its unique selling point.

Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat cuts to the chase quickly. Within 20 minutes, we are into the thick of action. A band of dacoits is aboard the same train as a commando and his girlfriend. The dacoits, led by Fani (an impressive Raghav Juyal) seal off some compartments before getting into looting. The girlfriend, whom the commando (Lakshya) has just proposed in the toilet, is murdered. Then the mayhem begins.

The movie is pretty limited from the story point of view. Deliberately so. The maker intends to throw you into a whirl of bloodshed and brutality and makes no secret of it. But that is all. The one-dimensionality of Kill is both its strength and weakness. We are used to overdose of violence being balanced by a touch of tenderness. The soft touch is absent. The characters don’t have backstories and the plot does not offer much to ponder beyond the happenings on the screen.

More seasoned reviewers and experts may have noticed something the writer missed. International filmmakers are in awe. It received wide applause at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it may have a purely English version soon. Now, it’s up to the viewer to decide.

(By Arrangements With Perspective Bytes)