Like most genres, the action flick evolved over the past decade. While the action once focused on big muscles and big guns, international influences inspired a shift. Boy Kills World draws from some of these high-octane martial arts and gun-jitsu movies that came before. However, it also learns some of the wrong lessons from your Deadpool‘s and Bullet Trains. With a reliance on video game antics and comedic tones, Boy Kills World berates the audience with random sight gags and jokes. The result is fun, but Boy Kills World feels hollow.
In a futuristic oligarchy, the Van Der Koy family rules with an iron fist. Led by Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), they complete a culling of peasants every year. Our protagonist, known as Boy (Bill Skarsgård, H. Jon Benjamin, & Nicholas Crovetti), watched his family die at Hilda’s hands. After years of training with The Shaman (Yayan Ruhian), Boy makes his move to take down the Van Der Koy family. On his way to kill Hilda, he must take down Gideon (Brett Gelman), Melanie (Michelle Dockery), Glen (Sharlto Copley), and their lead solider June27 (Jessica Rothe). After finding surprise allies Basho (Andrew Koji) and Bennie (Isaiah Mustafa), Boy stands a fighting chance at completing his revenge.
Directed by Moritz Mohr, Boy Kills World features some grade-A combat. This will undeniably be the biggest takeaway from the movie, with many of the action fights proving brutal and fun. The gore effects are super stylized, and the sound feels overdesigned during the longer fights. Depending on how you feel about these sequences, you will largely know how you feel about the movie.
The violence has few equals among recent hits. The CGI blood and dismemberment are gnarly. Bullets rip through bodies, and limbs are squished like grapes. When Boy Kills World wants to get gross, it has no qualms about turning up the heat. There’s even a drug-fueled Monty Python-inspired setpiece. With quick edits and an extremely active camera, Mohr crafts moments that make Boy Kills World entertaining (if you can stomach the violence).
There are also too many visual and audible gags at play. Boy Kills World is fun enough without a handful of gimmicks it pushes on the audience. While Benjamin proves helpful in establishing the levity at its heart, Boy Kills World also decides to drop his narration for significant stretches. While Benjamin delivers a rapid-fire comedic outlet, suddenly losing it showcases how out of place it feels.
Additionally, fights against June27 showcase an LED helmet that stands in for her comic book thought bubbles. It’s funny the first time, but by the tenth or eleventh time we get the shot, it’s lost all of its power. Another character speaks in random words, allowing the filmmakers to showcase the chaotic wordplay as jokes. It’s funny at first, but by the third or fourth time we watch the mashups occur, they’ve mostly lost their power.
The choice to dive into the action with randomness proves Boy Kills World‘s most frustrating aspect. It’s better than 2017’s Suicide Squad or 2010’s The Losers. Yet, at the same time, it’s too focused on trying to present absurd imagery to get laughs. While this works in a sitcom or television series, it does not work over a ninety-minute cohesive story. Worst of all, it distracts from the ideas and images that are working, most notably the fight choreography.
The actors who suffer most from this are Skarsgård, Ruhian, and Rothe. While there are certainly stunt doubles, each performer showcases impressive in-camera action chops. However, if we’re constantly cutting to other random events going on, we actively cut away from the impressive visual effect occurring in sight. This either means the actors did not have the goods on this front or the directors misplaced their focus.
The management of Ruhian, in particular, stands out. Fans of The Raid will grow annoyed with the constant teases without kicking the story back to him. It’s a shame because Ruhian earned his spot in the action-star pantheon long ago. Having him present feels like a tease, and they chose not to showcase his talent to the full extent. Mohr clearly has reverence for the actor, so it’s curious if there’s a lack of execution or a lack of belief in aspects of the movie. With Benjamin providing a literal video game voice, which only exists in the recut after Boy Kills World‘s TIFF premiere, seems to imply a lack of execution.
Despite these qualms, Boy Kills World entertains. It’s fun and, sometimes, extremely humorous. It’s a bloody beat ’em up that recalls B-movies of the 1980s that existed to satiate audience bloodlust. Additionally, Gellman and Dockery are outstanding, with each performer stealing the movie from their co-stars. They know exactly what kind of role they’re in, and because of that, they raise the silliness tenfold. There’s a lot of fun in Boy Kills World, and makes it difficult to hold a grudge against it.
Mohr seems to have the talent and vision to direct an awesome action flick. However, Boy Kills World never trusts the audience to live in these moments. Instead, it throws everything it can at the screen, falling short of its lofty ambitions. There will undoubtedly be fans that fall head over heels for Boy Kills World, but a few tweaks would have helped this reach a much larger audience.
