Kill lives up to its title, and then some. In many regards, the hyperviolent “vengeance is a dish best served ice cold” action film sells itself short by not calling itself Overkill.

This said, it takes a while to get to this level of breathless brutality. With great intentionality, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s film takes 45 minutes or so to establish a premise that feels cheesy. The emotions are overly wrought. The music needle drops are noticeably heavy handed. The quips between Amrit (an astonishing Lakshya Lalwani) and Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), two army commando friends, are corny. The forbidden romance between Amrit and Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), the latter of whom is about to be engaged in an arranged marriage, is all the cornier. Even as Amrit boards a train in order to break up the engagement, and this train is ransacked by a band of thieves, the emotions of the events feel pointedly heightened. With the irony dialed up some, the pieces here could be cobbled together into a parody.

Instead, the film that could be pitched as The Raid but on a train becomes a beast of a different nature when the title card drops at the 45 minute mark. The hour that follows ramps the action up to a level that at first is as devilishly gaudy as a B-movie but eventually morphs into a somber crucible of carnage.

These three levels – corny action sendup, violent B-movie, and weighty meditation on death – shouldn’t mesh. The glorious part about Kill is that, really, they don’t. One becomes the next becomes the next, and none of it betrays what has come before. If anything, the corny romance adds weight to the rug pull that leads us to a man-on-a-mission killing spree. And the ramification of this killing spree is a slowly building misery that begets more violence and little else. Family members mourn family members using rage and tears, which only leads to more deceased kin. By the end of the film, one cannot help but feel exhausted, not just by the wild visual stimulation of the brilliant stunt choreography but also by the pity extended toward desperately violent individuals who have lost all reason.

Somewhere in the middle, there’s a half hour or so stretch that is genuinely fun on its own terms as a John Wick style action film with one-versus-many fight sequences. But as the characters begin limping under the weight of their physical and psychological injuries, the mood comes down with them. (Rarely in the action genre do we see large henchman characters begin weeping at the sight of their fallen brothers in arms). There is a bitter pill to be swallowed here. But I felt it was well worth swallowing, as the journey the film takes you on was difficult to look away from.

Kill is a film of excess, but it is also a film which calls into question the gratuitousness of its own violence while simultaneously relishing in the extremity. In doing this, it manages to come off as refreshingly new while doing things that are quite familiar.

Kill: B+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)