ExpendableMan

The opening of Kill is one hell of a misdirection. The lead character is introduced with a dramatic revealing shot accompanied by a guitar riff, he's shown to be in a very sweet relationship with a wide-eyed young woman, and his jovial banter with his best friend is light and bromantic. You know that Kill is an action movie, but for the first forty minutes or so, you could be forgiven for thinking this will be another RRR. You're all set for the male hero to become a cinematic demigod and wondering when the first musical number will interrupt proceedings. Once the pivotal train hijack starts to unfold, the violence is relatively PG-13 level, with little focus on injuries and villains collapsing with a punch or two.

But without meaning to give too much away, there's a dramatic raising of the stakes when the film's title card finally appears onscreen, and oh boy, does it escalate. The handsome, muscular hero goes from being a swoon-inducing matinee idol to a dead-eyed psychopath and blood starts to fly. Heads are caved in with fire extinguishers, machetes slice into necks, knives plunge into stomachs and ripped upwards to spray blood in wide arcs...it's like being at a pretty intense Bullet For My Valentine concert, only for the lights to go off after 'Four Words To Choke Upon,' and then find Cannibal Corpse launching into 'Hammer Smashed Face' once they come back on again.

By the end, there's been a ridiculous amount of onscreen carnage and it's so unrelenting, that it's almost a relief when the film ends. This is not a crowd-pleasing Indian action epic a la Bahuubali, it's one of the most vicious fight films since The Night Comes For Us. The cramped confines of the overnight train make the fights feel up close and personal, the emphasis is on knives over firearms, and as mallets hit heads and people get thrown through glass windows, it looks like it really hurts. You finish Kill feeling like you've got almost as many bruises and lacerations as the exhausted hero, and songs? No songs, just gore mate. This was awesome.

No Way Up is a movie with a cool premise but doesn't manage to effectively hit the mark. It's the story of a small group of plane crash survivors, stranded in the wreckage of a jet at the bottom of the ocean. The air is dwindling, there's little hope of rescue and the plane is gradually tilting forwards into an immense oceanic abyss. What's worse, there are sharks on the prowl and they're very hungry.

In the early going, there's a lot of promise. The characters are introduced effectively with minimal fuss, and the movie wastes no time getting to the action. Roughly twenty minutes in, a bird strike leads to a catastrophic engine failure and the plane is soon hurtling towards the waves. The crash scene is really good, outdoing a similar moment in this year's Society Of The Snow with raw intensity. People are sucked through a gaping hole into the void and crushed in their seats on impact, and there's a brief but effective moment where two characters exchange looks after seeing water outside the windows before the plane starts to sink.

From there though, No Way Up falters. The survivors are stuck in the rear of the plane as predators hunt, but the film never matches the excitement of the crash. It's not as claustrophobic as it should be, nor as tense. The cast try their best, with Sophie McIntosh's resourceful heroine and Phyllis Logan's hard-as-nails Grandma being particularly good, but it never manages to capitalise on its full potential. No Way Up is okay and it certainly kills a boring ninety minutes, but the premise is better than the film.