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.

Mere months after Tim Burton’s Batman dominated not just the box office, but American cultural consciousness, ABC responded with Chameleons, a pilot movie for a new superhero series directly influenced by the Dynamic Duo. Just swap out Batman for one Captain Chameleon, replace Robin with the Paraclete of Justice, trade in the Batmobile for the Car-meleon and, well, there’s a reason you’ve never heard of this. 

Dozens, actually — only one of which has the nation wondering what a goddamn Paraclete is. 

In his last feature, swashbuckling legend Stewart Granger (1950’s King Solomon’s Mines) plays elderly publishing magnate Jason Carr, who moonlights as the Paraclete of Justice … but not for long, as black-robed, computer-voiced cult members kill him, staging his death as a heart attack “in bed with a sleazy hooker.” 

Carr’s sanitarium-patient granddaughter, Shelly (Crystal Bernard, Slumber Party Massacre II), investigates with the occasional help of Captain Chameleon (Marcus Gilbert, Army of Darkness). To justify his name, CC dons an invisibility cape and changes his costume’s color with the turn of a belt buckle that looks like a Trivial Pursuit piece with all six wedges filled. Presumably unrelated to lizard camouflage, he also ziplines to jaunty harpsichord music. Meanwhile, Shelly conducts undercover work posing as a prostitute. 

From prolific TV creator Glen A. Larson (Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, The Fall Guy, et al.), Chameleons is woefully out of touch. It’s like Larson’s knowledge of superheroes began and ended with Archie Comics’ Pureheart the Powerful. Bernard’s Shelly is all curls and homespun homilies, like a proto-Reba. 

As a result, no one cared; a series did not follow. Karma, Chameleons. —Rod Lott

As often happens to the sightless in the movies (Blind Fury, Daredevil, Don’t Breathe, et al.), a positive side of the disability manifests: a preternatural sense of hearing. Such is the case for former Special Forces Capt. Dong (Andy On, Black Mask 2: City of Masks) after he’s blinded by a grenade flash in a courthouse siege. That complicates Dong’s first civilian mission: Rescuing his kidnapped daughter, a violin prodigy, from auction on the dark web. Villains number many, with Jane Wu (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows) sexing things up and standing out in a too-brief role as the Dragon King.

Frequent On director Suiqiang Huo (Demon Sealer Bureau) appears to relish in the potential of the script’s setup. It’s Taken ripped from the pages of the Braille book of revenge. However, he fails continuously to give consistency to Dong’s aural power. The guy can dodge bullets by listening for the slightest trigger click … yet somehow fails to notice the oncoming van speeding toward him in an enclosed parking garage. 

Blind War can’t its find way to a satisfying whole. The action sequences can delight, but not all do. Among the most memorable involve a chain-and-dunk-tank contraption that could come straight out of Saw and, at the end, the ol’ ticking bomb our visually impaired hero must defuse. On the downside, not enough story beats exist to fill the gaps, and the back-half inclusion of a bumbling detective (a debuting Dao Dao) sits way too far on the Inspector Clouseau end of the comic-relief spectrum.

All in all, the Chinese film is a case of the blind leading the bland. It’s not the fault of its star, who brings his easy likability and striking physicality to the role. Selfishly, I just wish he’d brought his gorgeous wife (and Zombie Fight Club co-star), Jessica Cambensy, too.  —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Gaddafi’s old chemical plant: Remember that ol’ thing? Expend4bles sure does! By using those four words onscreen in its prologue, the ’80s throwback franchise gives a nod to those better times — the “glory days,” we called them — when Expend4bles didn’t exist.

Why the movie didn’t just go with The Expendables 4 is a from-the-start sign of h0w 5tup1d 1t i5. Need another? Right after the title sequence, Barney (Sylvester Stallone) visits a local strip club to retrieve his wedding ring from a two-pronged dildo behind the bar. 

I almost wish that alone were the plot, since that’s a scenario I’ve never seen, whereas assemblages of shipping containers? Been there.

But since this series loves it some shipping containers, it tasks Barney and Christmas (Jason Statham, The Beekeeper) — and any other Expendables just chillin’ at HQ — with keeping stolen nuclear detonators from falling into the hands of a shadowy terrorist. Because this madman goes by the name “Ocelot,” prepare to hear that word more than you’d find in an entire run of Zoobooks magazine.

The movie’s largest problem is how little it resembles one. As helmed by Need for Speed’s Scott Waugh, it’s way too clean, looking like a Nickelodeon kidcom at worst or a Jardiance commercial at best. Consider the following:
• Nearly every outdoors shot of our principals is green-screened, even if they’re merely standing on a front porch in the suburbs.
• All instances of blood splatter appear swiped from a decade-old video game.
• Effects sequences involving planes, trucks and anything else explodable are animated no more realistic than episodes of Hot Wheels AcceleRacers. 
• Former Transformers eye candy Megan Fox is the one effect not in need of meddling, yet someone has Clone Stamped her entire face in Photoshop to give her an eerie RealDoll look.

With three-peat Expendables like Jet Li, Terry Crews and Arnold Schwarzenegger hard-passing on a return, new recruits have been drafted apparently at random from Redbox, by Redbox. When he’s not steering a tugboat, Tony Jaa (Furious 7) impresses with his lightning-fast moves, and Levy Tran (The First Purge) makes a brief impression wielding a chain. Meanwhile, Andy Garcia (Geostorm) chews a toothpick, and 50 Cent (Den of Thieves) utters modern action cinema’s most clichéd line: “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”

Despite the brainpower of three screenwriters, one good scene made it through to final product: Dolph Lundgren’s sniper character can’t shoot for shit without first donning reading glasses.

I enjoyed the first film. Same goes with The Expendables 2 and 3, albeit to a lesser, messier degree, and I can’t tell you a single thing that happens in them. Expend4bles is such a huge step down in quality — not to mention literacy — that it’s too often indistinguishable from the franchise’s direct-to-video imitators. Perhaps it’s time for The Expendables to go from expandable to expunged.

Sly almost makes a wise decision to ensure if there’s a fifth chapter, it’d be without him. But you know the 33 credited producers wouldn’t allow that. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.