At The Movies: Kill delivers brutal combat, One Wish manipulates with heart-tugging

Kill (M18)

105 minutes, opens on July 18
4 stars

The story:

Special forces soldier Amrit (Lakshya)

boards a train, hoping to interrupt the upcoming arranged marriage of his beloved, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala). She and her family are passengers, on their way to arrange the wedding he is trying to prevent. On the same train are more than 30 bandits disguised as travellers. When they reveal themselves, Amrit and his buddy, fellow soldier Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), are the only ones standing between the bandits and mass robbery, or worse.

In a movie landscape filled with pretenders, two factors make this savage work of martial arts action stand out.

The first is the quality of the fights – they are brutal, realistic and shot with clarity.

Then there are the villains. This Hindi-language work, directed and co-written by Indian film veteran Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, features the most sinister and hateable baddies in recent film memory.

This is the one-versus-many plot of Die Hard (1988), if it met the hand-to-hand combat style of Nobody (2021) and both films were set in a single location.

Most of Kill takes place on board the cramped confines of a basic Indian passenger train.

Instead of the single location being a drawback, Bhat makes it a feature. The attacking hordes coming at Amrit have to meet his fists, elbows and feet one by one because of the narrow aisles, giving weight to the idea that one well-trained tough guy can defeat an army.

Being hemmed in by walls gives the hero plenty of places to practise close-quarters fighting – which, in the gun-free setting of India, means that men come at him with machetes, daggers and axes.

These, added to found objects such as fire extinguishers, add up to creative, often blackly humorous ways for the bandits to expire, with each death supported by wonderfully gross and gory practical effects. The local release remains unsanitised – note the M18 classification.

Instead of leaving the bandits as anonymous supporting characters designed to die, the film spends almost as much time on their stories as it does on the heroes. They are simply men born into a family business of banditry, torn between self-preservation and loyalty to the patriarch.

Of note is the crime scion Fani, brought to vivid, slimy life by Raghav Juyal. With a few lines and gestures, he establishes himself as not only cruel but also petty and privileged. In other words, he creates the perfect set-up for a cathartic showdown, which the film delivers.

Hot take: Kill shrugs off its kitschily romantic opening to deliver a feast of hardcore mixed martial arts action.

One Wish (PG)

140 minutes, opens on July 18
2 stars

The story: Amah from the Thai blockbuster How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024) has competition. Hai (Thanh Hien) is a 73-year-old widow living on her own in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, who questions the meaning of family love after an injury forces her to depend on the care of her busy adult children.

Somewhat misleadingly, the Face Off anthology originated by Vietnamese film-maker Ly Hai in 2015 sells itself as its national cinema’s “longest and most successful franchise”, despite the seven features and their changing casts being standalones.

Its success is irrefutable, though. One Wish, or Face Off 7, is Vietnam’s second highest-grossing film of all time. Such is the emotive power of family values among the Asian audience, and the director, who also scripted the movie, manipulates it for blatant heart-tugging.

The matriarch is saintly, reluctant to “bother the children” even though her leg is in a cast.

And the three sons and two daughters are variously a corporate manager (Truong Minh Cuong), a fisherman (Quach Ngoc Ngoan), a building contractor (Tran Kim Hai), a farmhand (Tram Anh) and a single mum (Dinh Y Nhung) with their own sob stories, whether poverty or an ailing child.

They draw lots to settle their selfish arguments over who will take in the old woman.

Hai is passed from one home to another. Her cross-country odyssey from the city to the coast to the villages captures the beauty of the land and – through the children’s livelihoods – the diversity of the local economy.

But her week-long visits with each are like episodes from a television soap opera – thank heavens she has just five kids – in which simplistic lessons of maternal sacrifice and filial piety are learnt.

Hot take: A tearjerker soggier than monsoon season.