We live in a decade that's given us a ton of high-energy, high-budget action movies with carefully choreographed combat - all with an excellent level of quality that's got to be a statistical anomaly.
I guess that's where Boy Kills World comes in; Something's got to balance the scales.
Boy (Bill Skarsgård) is a deaf-mute dude who lives with a Shaman (Yayan Ruhian!) in the middle of the jungle. He was taken in as a kid after the evil head of the totalitarian city nearby (Famke Janssen) killed his mom and little sister; The shaman knew his mother, so he subjects boy to a brutal training regimen to turn him into a killing machine with the sole objective on getting revenge against this Van Der Koy family who run the government or... something; this a very, very thinly drawn dystopia that insists on portraying its ruling family more as hacky Hollywood parodies than anything political*. The movie makes a token show of establishing what a bunch of dicks they are - casual oppression and mass murder, a yearly televised culling of known dissidents, being a very superficial caricature of celebrity culture, that sort of thing.
One of the film's main gimmicks is that while boy is deaf mute, his inner voice is provided by none other than Bob Belcher himself, H. Jon Benjamin, with a near-constant stream of smartass comments that aim for humorous and consistently, sometimes catastrophically, miss their mark. This is an extremely, uncomfortably unfunny movie that telegraphs all of its piss-poor punchlines. You know that lame Marvel-style joke where someone starts saying something cool, the music swells, and suddenly they fall down or fuck up or whatever? Yeah, that's the sort of thing you can look forward to here.
Making H. Jon Benjamin not funny is some kind of feat, but writer/director Moritz Mohr makes it look easy.
Anyhow. Boy fights his way up the Van Der Koys (Sharlto Copley, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, and Brett Gelman) on his way to the matriarch in a series of fights and shootouts that mimic the progression of a videogame - I'm going to say that's intentional, since Boy's inner voice was taken from an off-brand Street Fighter clone. It's absolutely the sort of game I'd be desperately hitting buttons to skip cutscenes.
There's a deeply stupid, nonsensical twist near the end, and even worse, the movie seems to get ever-so-slightly more serious - suddenly it clearly expects us to give a shit about its plot and characters! The moment I realized this provided the only laugh I had during the entire movie; For context, this comes right after a scene in a televised show where innocents are "comically" murdered by people dressed up as goofy cereal mascots.
The tone shift at least leads to a pretty brutal final fight which is still spoiled by poor filmmaking, but it's much, much better than all the faff preceding it.
Just about nothing in this sorry mess works. It's meant to be a style over substance affair, but the style fails to look interesting. The comedy aspects... there are a few bits that are funny on paper - like a guy (Isaiah Mustafa) whose lips Boy can't read, so he keeps spouting
Pootie Tang-style nonsense, a fight at least partially inspired by a famous Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene (he's got issues), and a wince-inducing tactical use of cheese graters - but the execution is botched at every turn. That's when the script bothers with actual jokes; a lot of the humour is a sort of incidental, really forced wackiness like the mascot fight.
And the action! What a fucking waste. The choreographies (action coordinator: Dawid Szatarski) are involved and seem fun, but are ruined by disorienting camerawork and choppy editing that rarely let us get a good long look at what's going on; some of those camera moves are interesting (a couple takes, for example, use drones to zoom through a pretty busy brawl), but this showiness comes at the expense of momentum and clarity. It's really frustrating, because there are some really good moves and stunts in there; But I can only remember one short part of a longer warehouse fight where the camera didn't seem to me to be at odds with the action.
Blood is mostly CGI, providing another layer of artificiality to the proceeds. I tend to roll my eyes at CGI blood in the best of cases, and this movie is a really a good argument in favour of squibs and practical effects; In that surprisingly non-jokey final fight, you'll often see a huge burst of goopy, comic-style blood, followed by a shot showing a floor that's completely free of any splatter.
At least the acting is pretty good, even if it's in the service of these non-entities. Rothe is cool when she's not donning a stupid, unfunny helmet the movie insists on saddling her with (You know you're in trouble when you're ripping off a character from a Ubisoft game), Copley is... well, he's one likeable weirdo, and seems to be having fun. But the movie belongs to Skarsgård; His full-on action hero debut is impressive, and the mix between his comical idiocy mixed in with what's basically peak human form is almost - almost! - enough to make some of the material work. Let's get the man a better John-Wick-like next time.
*: You could say that's a solid satirical point these days, but there's no way I'm giving this movie that much credit.
