Haymaker 2025 Review: In KILL, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Crowdpleaser Gives You What You Pay For
Kill screens for the first-annual Haymaker Film Festival beginning Friday. The movie is also available on Digital and Disc from Lionsgate.
If you’ve been paying attention for the last few years on the action cinema frontier, you’ll recall that director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat had one of the hottest tickets in town to offer when he delivered Kill to the world. The film is tactful action drama that percolates to a bloody boil and pivots toward a wall-to-wall cutthroat revenge flick that’s rightly earned the praise it’s gotten from critics and viewers.
Needless to say in a post-The Raid world, Southeast Asian cinema as violent as this is ripe for the taking, and that it’s already stirred sequel and remake prospects says everything you need to know of how lucrative a film like Kill is. To this, it’s no wonder why the good stewards over at the Haymaker Film Festival efforted to license this particular title to its debut audience for its launchpad event in Utah this week.
A blind watch probably won’t even alert you to just how crazy this film gets within the first half as we meet Amrit (Lakshya), a special forces commando willing to do anything to be with Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), the woman he loves whose powerbroker father already has his sights set on a new suitor for his eldest daughter. Together with fellow comrade Viresh (Tanya Maniktala), Amrit tags along his beloved’s train to New Delhi to assure his matrimony with Tulika. Little do either of them know that a familial gang of more than several dozen bandits have infiltrated the train with goals nothing short of violent havoc and thievery.
Technically, this film has long been available on digital and disc so anything I could say to spoil the film in any other instance wouldn’t necessarily be so, but I call myself thinking of those who haven’t yet borne witness to this film since its commercial arrival. Thus, let your imagination run wild when I tell you things go from beautiful to bad to absolute fucking worse before Amrit realizes it; The movie’s official title card doesn’t appear until seconds toward the forty-five minute mark, almost so as to nudge the audience with what’s about to happen, and like any goddamn good filmmaker, Bhat gives viewers what they pay for.
The remaining hour of this movie is nothing short of a blood bath from one scrimmage to the next, on a cramped train with narrow halls and tight spaces, and the occasional stunt sequence happening atop the train roof. Amrit is nothing short of an unstoppable one man killing machine fervently turning the tide against the bandits, including the leader, Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi) and his wily son, Fani (Raghav Juyal), and with each kill count, it’s not too long before reality starts to settle with Beni and some of the others about just who exactly it is they’re dealing with.
Furthering the stakes is Amrit’s desperate search for other surving members of Tulika’s family who happen to be on the opposite side of the train. It’s a simulataneous game of wits and weapons, and you can count on Amrit being quick as can be despite the odds and frequent ambushings. It’s insane, really. And that sort of speaks to the psychological lynchpin of Kill in profiling Amrit, whose character becomes subject to pathology in a hilarious moment when Fani is backed into a corner and starts questioning (quoting not in verbatim) “What kind of man kills like this?”.
The action and violence, constructed accordingly by Oh Se-young, is a heavy-handed assortment of fisticuffs, breakneck and stabby-stabby kickassery. Guns are seldom used here in this particular setup which ultimately helps when makes the hand-to-hand and CQC choreo the centerpiece of it all. That, and the copious amounts of blood that Bhat incorporates in this wild ride of an action flick.
All else aside, Lakshya deserves greater prospects after this film. If a sequel happens, I’m inclined to learn more about his character and what will entail as someone who went through what he did as a precursor to a potential second chapter with Bhat at the helm if that’s the case. I’m especially curious as to how a reimaging would bode here, and when or if these happen, I’ll be more than happy to help cast a spotlight for the rest of us. In the meantime, consider this your invite to bring Kill into your purview and make it part of your collection.
