‘Boy Kills World,’ Critic Reviews Movie
This dystopian political action-comedy/family drama is a very ambitious mixed bag.
One thing I didn’t see any critics mention about Boy Kills World when it was released last month: how ambitious the movie is. Boys Kills World is a dystopian political action-comedy with a Shakespearean family soap opera at its center… which is, y’know, a lot to balance.
Does Boy Kills World pull it off?
No, not really.
But I appreciate that first-time director Moritz Mohr took such a big swing.
Boy Kills World is set an unnamed fictional city ruled by a wealthy, despotic family, including enforcer and aspiring writer Gideon Van Der Koy (Brett Gelman, The Other Guys); minister of propaganda Melanie Van Der Koy (Michelle Dockery, The Gentleman); Glen Van Der Koy (Sharlto Copley, District 9), Melanie’s husband and the public face of the whole operation; and grand puba Hilda Van Der Koy (X-Men’s Famke Janssen). Every year, the Van Der Koy’s have an event called The Culling, which is basically just a day of rounding up dissidents who are then publicly executed on television. Why this family rules over a single city and not an entire nation is unclear, but whatever.
The hero of the story, Boy (Bill Skarsgård, Barbarian), is a deaf/mute who hopes to avenge the murder of his sister and mother at the hands of the Van Der Koys. To do this, he spends years doing Kill Bill-esque masochistic training with a demanding and enigmatic martial artist, Shaman (Yayan Ruhian, who you ought to recognize from The Raid movies and John Wick 3). Eventually, he teams up with a revolutionary named Basho (Andrew Koji, Bullet Train) to infiltrate Van Der Koy HQ and kill anyone.
Also, his inner monologue sounds like the announcer from a Street Fighter-esque arcade game, voiced here by H. Jon Benjamin, one of the most prominent V.O. performers of the past thirty years (he’s the title character in both Archer and Bob’s Burgers, the can of vegetables in Wet Hot American Summer, Ben Katz on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, etc.).
The problem with Boy Kills World is that everything is sort of okay and also sort of bad. The cast has multiple talented comedic performers, but most of the jokes are so obvious and one-note they fall flat. Like, by the umpteenth instance of Copley’s character being a vain sociopath, the gag has become tiring and predictable. And that’s true of all the Van Der Koy characters, save for the one played by Janssen, because she’s only in the movie for about five minutes total. Gelman, for his part, actually fairs better when the movie switches gears mid-way and becomes more dramatic; once we get to see some of his character’s regret and pathos, he becomes interesting. Alas, his siblings are never granted the same treatment; the only other antagonist who gets anything resembling depth is the family’s primary enforcer, a mysterious woman known only as June27 (Happy Death Day’s Jessica Rothe, doing her best from behind a mask that completely obscures her face for 99% of the film).
So while I worship the ground on which Benjamin walks, I honestly found his constant voice-over to be kind of annoying of here - there are stretches of this movie that would work as a silent film, but they keep having him interject these constant wisecracks that, again, just don’t really land. After about twenty minutes, I really just wanted him to shut the hell up. I mean, Skarsgård, we all know from It, is expressive as hell. He’s perfectly capable of telling us everything we need to know with his face, dialogue be damned. The V.O. doesn’t add anything, and isn’t thematically important. It may, in fact, just be there to distinguish Boy Kills World from the other recent film that asked “What if John Wick but less dialogue?”, Silent Night.
The movie isn’t completely without laughs, though: the gore is so over-the-top as to be frequently hilarious (not for nothing is the inimitable Sam Raimi, the king of the so-called “spook-a-blast,” one of this film’s producers). But even the violence loses some of its kick because so much of it is clearly CGI generated; this kind of exaggerated slapstick is most effective when done practically (see: every slasher movie made during the 1980s).
And then there’s the action scenes, which, like everything else in the movie, are hit or miss. There’s a great foot chase, and a couple of cool fights (the big one at the end is especially brutal in the best possible way).
But there’s also some typical Michael Bay nonsense where you have no real sense of geography or what’s actually happening (there’s also a criminal abuse of drone footage, as was also the case with Bay’s Ambulance and the Ryan Gosling vehicle The Gray Man).
Which to say nothing of how jarring it is when the movie suddenly becomes a fairly serious drama somewhere around the middle. That would be a hard tonal shift for any filmmaker to pull off, and Mohr fumbles it.
Oh, and then there’s the movie’s politics: it’s kind of saying something about the thin line before mutineers and dictators, but not really. Like, it’s such an afterthought, it feels more like an excuse to squeeze in one more bout of fisticuffs than anything else.
That’s Boy Kills World in a nutshell: every single element is a mixed bag. It’s just as hard for me to imagine anyone loving it as it is for me to imagine everyone hating it. For all the effect it has, the movie might as well be called Boy Happens to World.
Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to see what Mohr does for a follow-up. Whatever else you wanna say about Boy Kills World, it’s not bland… and that ain’t nuthin’.