A fever dream action film that follows Boy, a deaf person with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he is trained by a mysterious shaman to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death.
We used to get weird, gonzo action movies like this with a semi-strange premise and a lot of action. The whole thing might seem a little copy-and-paste when it comes to plotting, but it lived or died because of its action and cast. As long as the cast seems like it’s having fun, then we’re all aboard, but until then, the movie is up in the air. Let me tell you, “Boy Kills World” clearly has its fun. Everyone on the cast is hamming it up, absolutely milking every scene they get, and generally causing over-the-top violent mayhem. “Boy Kills World” is exactly what you’d expect it to be, but by really committing to its goals, it succeeds in many ways that people might be surprised to hear.
“Boy Kills World” follows Boy, played with verve by Bill Skarsgård (my favorite of the family), a man trained to assassinate the evil corporate family overlords by his mystic Shaman. Both deaf and mute, this assassin departs on his mission to kill an entire family of evil people and, along the way, make allies with the rebellion. As he battles, brutalizes, and beats the ever-living hell out of henchmen and mini-bosses in this dungeon crawl, his inner monologue vamps and cracks wise about the hijinks therein.
Some movies really do play like video games, and this one explicitly states so. Multiple times, the narrator sets up the next fight with an opener or calls out a fatality in all but aping “Mortal Kombat.” The appeal of this film is its dungeon crawl slaughter with a thin layer of character and plot to keep the audience going. Sure, he has to kill the family, but he has to have a semblance of a reason. This premise might seem absurd, but the film plays into that absurdity by calling it out from time to time. A snarky inner monologue sort of plays as that audience surrogate laughing and making jokes about what’s wrong with movies or merely cracking up at the flawed plotting.
This movie knows what it’s about. It knows we want to see bad guys get blown away. Our hero has to have a bit of an inner conflict. Our villains have to be near-perfectly unhinged. This movie delivers exactly what it sets up in spades, and boy, does it look like the cast is having an absolute blast. Between Brett Gelman hamming it up, Michelle Dockery and Sharlto Copley nitpicking, and Famke Janssen going absolutely unhinged, you’d think there’s no room for extras, but this movie doesn’t disappoint. An extra special shout-out goes to Andrew Koji and Isaiah Mustafa for giving not only the most over-the-top line readings (Koji practically shouts everything in an accent) but also the most nonsensical lines (Isaiah Mustafa never says a single coherent line.) To anchor it all, Skarsgård clearly understood the assignment. He doesn’t play his assassin with stoic vigor but rather a wide-eyed curiosity. He’s an assassin, sure, but he’s also spent most of his life in the jungle, so silly things like macarons stop him dead in his murderous tracks to gorge on little delights. Director Moritz Mohr knows how to keep his cast happy and lean into the wackiness.
Overall, the premise feels like a riff on “The Hunger Games” and “John Wick,” but where both those franchises take serious turns, this movie brightens up. The costumes are funky, more video game-esque. The locations run the gamut of a weapons manufacturing plant, a luxurious mansion, a massive jungle, grungy city streets, a fake snow Christmas-themed TV set, and a sterile bunker. It’s bright and colorful and even the violence pops. Blood spurts in bright red blossoms. Goons go down like fireworks on the Fourth of July. It’s the sort of pop-art inspiration that makes the details of this movie really sing.
The action works most of the time. In this movie, the camera swings egregiously around from time to time. The operator tilts and rotates the camera repeatedly to help sell the choreography at times when it probably didn’t need that much shake. The sequences cut together well, and it makes the entire thing really sell its violence. They utilize drones on occasion to sort of sweep around the set of action (you can tell by its signature wide turns) in an exciting way.
As far as the plot goes, the movie focuses on our protagonist’s core wound: losing his family. It amps up the plotting heavily early on, catching us up more by force than by creativity, but all of that early plotting leads to a point. It won’t take the audience long to intuit where the movie is going, so it validates why we spend so much time early on in the story. By the movie’s end, the twists and turns are definitely predictable, but that doesn’t necessarily detract from it.
“Boy Kills World” isn’t afraid to have its cake and eat it too. With the talent on screen making the absolute most out of everything, the film pops in bright bursts like its gun violence. Its story doesn’t have to impress to retain us as an audience, but its most focused on its action sequences, and in that place, it succeeds. As far as dungeon crawl movies go, this one’s above its peers in both personality and style. If you’re gonna make a bit, I’m glad to see this movie really commit to its bit.
In Theaters Friday, April 26th
