After his fiancée (Tanya Maniktala) is kidnapped by train robbers, a commando (Lakshya) seeks delay re-payback, in this 2023 Indian action movie.

The tone of this film is as strained as rail union-government relations. It has the ultra-violent combat of The Raid but the escapist melodrama of Bollywood, and the result puts the Tony Jaa in tonally jarring. The high-speed fight scenes are consistently derailed by the stagecoach performances where all the actors play to the camera, every bad-boy pose taking the movie another stop away from reality.

It is interesting to see the world’s second-oldest film industry seeking the international clout of the more extreme output from studios further east, but like its Hindi-English dialogue, Kill feels stuck between the two stations. Though the train car-nage features more strikes than the RMT (and even a few Mick lynchings), there is nothing threatening about the cartoonish heroes and villains, weak foley and nonsensical storyline.

Armed dacoit Fani (Raghav Juyal) decides to bring all 40 members of his family on a train heist, resulting in a veritable buffet car of violent terminations, all unbeknownst to the train security guards. Of all the reasons given when trains stop running (I was recently delayed by the spillage of “a big pot of mustard”), one would expect 40 bodies to at least warrant a call to see if there’s a doctor on board.

But Kill is trained on theatricality and masculinity over believability or intensity; the bandits cry at every passenger taken ill, while our hero cop doesn’t shed a tear or even break a sweat, unaffected by the discomfort of going Commando on a train.