When did you last hear of an Indian all-out actioner picked up for a Hollywood remake, besides getting feted at top film fests?
A still from the action film Kill
Back in the mid-’90s, filmmaker Nikhil Nagesh Bhat—a Bihari, of Maharashtrian ancestry—used to regularly take the ‘Bombay Junta’ Express, from his hometown, Patna, to Pune, where he was studying, then.
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On one such “36-40-hour ride”, Bhat found his train stranded at a desolate spot, way off the scheduled Prayagraj, in the morning. Cops had entered the compartment.
The AC two-tier coach, next-door, had got fully looted, over the night. Danapur Cantonment neighbours Patna, which explains the number of soldiers on the train, who regretted not having known about the burglary.
They would’ve done something about it, otherwise!
Bhat tells me this incident somehow remained stuck in his subconscious, once he got down to script a pure, action-genre movie, in 2016.
Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat
And that somewhat equals Kill (2024), on Ranchi-Delhi, Rajdhani Express—probably the only Indian, all-out actioner that, as we speak, has been picked up by John Wick director, Chad Stahelski, for a Hollywood remake, with Lionsgate.
This is besides premiering with a ‘people’s choice award’ at the 2023 Toronto film festival’s much-loved Midnight Madness section, along with a fairly wild festival run, thereafter. ‘Midnight’ being film-fest euphemism for a temperamentally more public-friendly, ‘masala movies’, if you may.
Well before its theatrical release (July 5), I watched Kill with assorted ‘Bombay junta’—potential exhibitors, select fanboys/girls—visibly lighting up, unabashedly clapping, on occasion, to the lethal, gruesome, blood-spluttering fest, that hits a train, on the sixth minute of the movie, and carries on for its 100-minute running time; non-frickin’-stop!
Instantly, I could tell, you gotta watch this with a crowd—or don’t bother, at all. What’s it about action that seems to so draw us into the movies?
Catharsis apart, I guess, it’s the same way we enjoy spectator sport—apart from the skill, as a proxy for war, that we hope none have to fight, in real life (IRL)!
Also, movie-violence is to physical skirmish, what well-lit erotica is to actual sex. Too choreographed to be true. Which is why I find parental arguments against its social impact, rather overrated. Even children can tell, as they do with video games, such pornographic action ain’t real; too kiddish for them too!
Take the robbery and retaliation scenes in Kill, set entirely between train compartments. It’d be plain ‘bhassad’ (pure pandemonium), impossible to film, if that many people were to fight it out in tiny passageways, with hits and misses, fists and sticks.
It’s to the technical credit of the production designer (Mayur Sharma), cinematographer (Rafey Mehmood), that Killer looks so killer!
Obviously, this is not the first movie on a moving train. Take the Japanese Junya Sato’s iconic, ticking-bomb, Bullet Train (1975; slated for remake). Of course, it would’ve kinda inspired the desi, multi-starrer, The Burning Train (1980).
But more so, the Hollywood blockbuster, Speed (1994). Which is what, if not—according to a line in the latest, Netflix random romcom, A Family Affair—“Die Hard on a bus”? Couldn’t sit through the recent, stilted, Brad Pitt starrer, Bullet Train (2022), though.
Compared to the unintentionally prescient, Korean Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie-apocalypse brilliance, Train To Busan (2016), there are even fewer scenes of staged dialogues in Kill. At best, it’d be enough to fit four pages of a screenplay. As per convention, a page equals a minute. I asked Bhat, if my math matches?
On the contrary, he laughs, the script was way too lengthy and boring to read. Because it contained every action movement, down to its minutest detail: “It became the Bible!”
Usually, action directors, traditionally ‘fight masters’ in India, film their own stunt set-pieces. In a movie like Kill then, Bhat would have nothing to do!
He found a willing/agreeable ally, or Seoul mate, I suppose, in the Korean, Se-yeong Oh, who’d also choreographed action for the Parasite director Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013).
It’s similarly set on a train. And one of Bhat’s admitted inspirations. The other being, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986)—“because both the alien and the astronaut in the movie had something vital to protect: their young one.”
Bollywood’s Parvez Shaikh (Sultan, Vikram Vedha) got onboard too. As it is, Koreans have mastered the filmic fiction of bashing humans to pulp.
Bloody Kill, bravely produced by Guneet Monga and Karan Johar, starring well-trained newcomers, Lakshya, Raghav Juyal, could be described as a mixed martial arts (MMA) flick, with raw street-fight, meeting sophisticated mortal combat.
Bhat says he made sure to properly cast for all the fighting roles (Ashish Vidyarthi, etc), instead of blindly enrolling effective stunt-men: “They had to emote!” There’s perennially someone/something at stake.
What I especially loved about Kill, that gets progressively grimmer, is the collectively subtle character-graph of regular passenger-blokes, witnessing fatal madness on a train.
At some point, when too much fear is employed by bullies, you begin to stop fearing fear itself. Something for tyrants to fear the most!
Almost as a rule of thumb, I feel, as deaths become cheap in a movie, so does the price of the ticket. For, what’s there to emotionally engage, if everyone can die so easy, anyway.
I suspect Bhat has pulled off a notable exception for Indian cinema, in that regard. What then holds the crucial key to Kill? Consistency. Always.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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