Kill: Lakshya, Raghav Juyal's Film Displays Exceptional Combative Skill
kill: lakshya, raghav juyal's film displays exceptional combative skill
Come Friday don’t bother to buy popcorn while watching Kill. Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s relentless bone-cruncher is a one-of-its-kind experience which will leave you open mouthed and thunderstruck.
Sure, you have seen other riveting action films before in various languages. But have you seen one where the action is so organic to the plot that the dialogues feel like an intrusion?
Luckily, the character in Kill don’t talk much. They just well, fight and kill. Incredibly, the action is all orchestrated—or do I mean , choreographed?—on board a train. A standing ovation to stunt directors Se-yeong Oh and Parvez Shaikh for creating a vocabulary of such visually vibrant violence in the confined space of a speeding train.
It all feels completely credible, thanks to the debutant hero. Lakshya as the Commando Amrit is almost a one-man army (almost, because he does have comrade in the combat played well by Abhishek Chauhan, to begin with) in this railway-ridden celebration of mayhem strewn with quips and corpses, impelled by a mood of mounting tension which never dips into bathos: director Bhat won’t let it.
The growing tension as the hero takes on a train full of dacoits, is relentless. The fights erupt with the kind of brute force never seen before, not even in the Korean action films. Once the action starts it never stops. There are no digressions, no deflections . Bhat creates an immersive palpable tension with each bloody combat. The violence is not meant for the squeamish. But the violence, let me quickly add, is not gratuitous.
Everyone is in this for the kill. The camera (Rafey Mehmood) moves stealthily through the cramped aisles separating the seats on the train. The badass mood moves at the speed of the train, creating spaces for the action pieces in the claustrophobic setting, as though the director had given himself the challenge to activate the action in a place where we have never seen it before.
Lakshya does the rest. As a debutant he looks remarkably equipped to take on the vile caucus that gives a bad name to train travel. The one problem that the proceedings pose for the audience is to keep track of who’s who among the odious chaos creators. They all seem scruffy and psychotic, as they are meant to.
Raghav Juyal as the salient marauder stands out, as he is meant to. His character has a certain ironic bent to its sadistic nature. Juyal has the film’s only amusing line when he reminds his harried father (Ashish Vidyarthi) that he is not Amitabh Bachchan from Mohabbatein and must stop talking about ideals as they are mere dacoits.
Banditry is graphically violative in Nikhil Bhat’s world of wounded morality. It is not enough to say good finally triumphs over evil in Kill. The wages of sin are demonic in this film. It cuts like a knife and wounds like a curse.
Kill may put you off train journeys for good. But it sure as hell whets your appetite for further explorations of the action genre by a director who knows how to monitor the mood of mayhem in rugged hostile settings. Nikhil Bhat did it in Apurva. He does it again in Kill. This time the combative skill goes far beyond just the routine thrill.
And yes, Lakshya looks like a hero who can take on a train full of sociopaths. A star is born, and no scar is borne. The hero emerges unvanquished , bloody and wounded but ready to redux.