If revenge is a dish best served cold, Kill serves it up — with seconds, like it or not — delivered on a block of dry ice. In the deceptively simple Bollywood actioner, Lakshya — just Lakshya, thanks — kicks ass figuratively and literally as National Security Guard commando Capt. Amrit Rathod.

His longtime girlfriend, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala, as charming as she is beautiful), is forced into an engagement by her father, a titan of the transportation industry. So with a ring of his own, Amrit hops the Delhi-bound train she and her family are riding, in hopes of saving his beloved.

That Tulika accepts his commode-set proposal doesn’t surprise Amrit. But that it happens as money-hungry kidnappers take over the train and target her family in a full-blown terrorist/hostage situation? Yeah, that’s quite a swerve.

As Amrit slides into Everyone’s Savior mode, he lays out Kill’s killer concept: 36 bandits across four coach cars on one unstoppable train. Personally, I like his odds. I also acknowledge the setup is so mindless, a kid could write it.

But could a kid execute it as well as writer/director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat? Not a chance! Most working filmmakers in America aren’t even up to the task. Not since Gareth Evans’ stick of Indonesian dynamite, The Raid: Redemption, has an action film been this pure, kinetic, inventive and unforgiving. Not Evans’ The Raid 2, nor a single John Wick flick, any four of which Kill arguably most resembles. It plays — and for keeps — as if Mr. Wick bought a one-way ticket on David Leitch’s Bullet Train. And no dance sequence!

What Lakshya lacks in leading-man verisimilitude, he makes up for in violence. Befitting of its title, Kill is relentless in soundtrack-squishiness as Amrit and allies face a seemingly endless barrage of fist, feet, machetes, sledgehammers, cleavers, daggers, fire extinguishers, etc. etc. etc., much of it dealt by Thakur, the skeeviest of bad guys.

If you don’t hate Thakur on sight, the scene-stealing actor portraying him, Raghav Juyal, soon will take care of that. Juyal relishes the opportunity to become the Hindi Hans Gruber. This fight film’s juice is well worth the squeeze, even when your wind pipe is the one being compressed. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Basically a remake of Lucio Fulci’s The New Gladiators, Brandon Slagle’s Arena Wars also forces Death Row inmates to combat on live television in the near future. For this Mahal Empire production, that’s the year 2045 vs. Fulci’s 2072, because let’s not get too crazy. 

That TV show is called — surprise! — Arena Wars. Despite being co-hosted by a most grizzled, most hair-dyed Michael Madsen (Mahal Empire’s Death Count), it’s a nationwide smash. But with ratings not what they used to be, one of the rich white men behind it asks, “How do we make death exciting for the masses again?” 

The answer involves pitting seven Death Row inmates with QR-code neck tattoos against the show’s seven costumed killers. Sporting names like Meat Wagon, each villain has a concept: Mr. Smiles is a homicidal clown; Master Blaster wields a chainsaw; Cutie Pie, the lone female, slings a mean machete.

Meanwhile, on the prisoners’ side, our hero is former Marine and current innocent man Luke Bender (John Wells, Mahal Empire’s Bermuda Island), who looks like every guy you’ve ever seen wearing a shirt from Tapout and/or Ed Hardy. They progress through seven rooms, like Bruce Lee in Game of Death, only horizontal.

These futuristic bread-and-circus pics number greater than events in the Olympics — summer and winter combined. Unlike most, which are funny only in the ways the filmmakers did not imagine, the script by Slagle (House of Manson) has an actual sense of humor — a Mahal Empire staple. For instance, the opening scene’s titles orient us in “THE BIG FUCKING CITY,” while Madsen comments on one contestant’s grisly fate, “I’d hate to be the underpaid janitor who has to clean that up.” 

Brothers Sonny and Michael Mahal’s story hits the basic beats without playing notes to connect them. Thus, fight scenes constitute the bulk, which gets tiresome … unless you’re the kind of person who watches WWE Raw, likely the intended audience anyway. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.