Comix meet video games meet genre flicks old and new in Boy Kills World (now streaming on Hulu), the ultraviolent feature debut from director Moritz Mohr. He shows serious martial-arts action chops in this pulpy killfest, starring Bill Skarsgard as the “Boy” who can’t speak and can’t hear but certainly can administer compound fractures when he needs to. The film is part wuxia and part Looney Tunes and part live-action anime, and is about as obnoxious as that implies – but we’ve overcome more obnoxious things, right? Well, possibly not.
The Gist: His strength and resilience is born from suffering. He’s buried alive, sucking air through bamboo, eating nothing but the occasional doomed stink bug unfortunate enough to alight atop said tube. He is Boy (Skarsgard), and for him to have a definitive, distinctive name would only distract him from becoming an ultimate-warrior killing machine, all sinew and muscle and bone, taut and flexed and ready to put fists not just into faces, but through them. And of course, there’s a damn good reason for this. The nasty-nasty Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) killed his family in cold blood, and on top of that, she rules this hellscape of an existence with such cruelty, she stages an annual “culling” in which her goons round up dissidents and publicly execute them. Which is a long way of saying that she really, really sucks.
Of course, a vacuum does not produce humans like Boy. No, he’s been trained by the Shaman (Yayan Ruhian), who’s the type of eccentric and wiry sensei we see in the Asian pulp cinema Quentin Tarantino simply adores. Did I mention that Boy had his tongue cut out and his earholes burned with hot pokers, rendering him deaf and mute, although we hear his thoughts via the voiceover of Bob Belcher/Sterling Archer himself, H. Jon Benjamin? And that he regularly hallucinates his little sister Mina (Quinn Copeland), tut-tutting beside him as he performs deeds that are morally questionable unless you’re in a pulp-splattered revenge saga? Well, he does.
What transpires from here is a platform-plot wherein Boy moves from one hyperviolent skirmish to another in an attempt to reach the reclusive Hilda, so he can, I dunno, smash her guts with a sledgehammer? Stomp on her skull until it’s moosh? Fire arrows at her until the very last one goes right through her eye, penetrating her brain? The possibilities are ENDLESS! Standing in his way are other Van Der Koy sibs, including husband-wife idiots Glen (Sharlto Copley) and Melanie (Michelle Dockery), and sneering pusbucket Gideon (Brett Gelman), all of whom are protected by a mysterious she-warriorknown as June27 (Jessica Rothe), who cuts people to bits while wearing an abs-revealing leather motorcycle getup, complete with a helmet with a digital readout that “speaks” for her. So many people die horrifically in this movie. Ain’t that a stitch?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Deadpool nihilist snark meets Kill Bill and Mad Max, I guess – although more apt comparisons are mid-2000s empty action-stylegasms like Smokin’ Aces and Shoot ’Em Up.
Performance Worth Watching: Skarsgard certainly benefits from not having to read any of this gratingly self-conscious, quasi-waggish dialogue. He’s actually quite good at expressive facial pantomime, lending an innocence to Boy that gives him just enough depth to make us almost care about his fate.
Memorable Dialogue: This movie is full of “witty” one-liners that Fortnite-addled junior-high-schoolers – and Fortnite-addled junior-high-schoolers alone – would find funny: “That’s why you do the fisty-punchy and he does the mouthy-talky” and “You soggy-cereal shit pirate!”, as well as the mumblings of a character who speaks wholly in non-sequiturs, e.g., “Tramp stamp skidmark!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Boy Kills World is relentlessly juvenile, and that may work for some. For the rest of us, it’s just an annoying technical exercise in totally hilarious violence that might work for a taut 90 minutes but instead drags out to a tumescent 111. It’s a semi-plotless revenge movie that, unlike, say, Furiosa, has nothing to say about the pointlessness of revenge, because in the worlds of movies like Boy Kills World, nothing really matters. It’s merely a place where the hero drags a cheese grater over his opponents’ faces and the bumbling villains call each other “dinglef—” while we gut out flying headbutts and excruciating tendon-pinches, and sift through the compound fractures and severed limbs, in search of a sliver of a theme. I was not wholly unsuccessful – there’s a microscopic bit of subtext here in which Mina the Hallucination functions as Boy’s conscience and implies that violence is actually bad and doesn’t solve anything, but that’s just something to be discarded among all the mangled bodies.
I’m no prude. Kill Bill and its massive corpse piles? That’s awesome. A terrific amalgamation of Tarantino’s influences. Exhilarating. But Boy Kills World is the wrong kind of exh – exhausting. And too much of it feels secondhand – Gelman’s channeling of a distinctly Peter Sarsgaardian madness, Copley as the beta who’s trying to be an alpha, Dockery as a sneering rhymes-with-snitch, Ruhian as the mysterious guru, Rothe as a gimmicky video-game boss, Benjamin’s tired Mortal Kombat video-game spiels (“PLAYER ONE WINS!” he bleats. “GAME OVER!”) the whole setting as a sort-of post-apocalyptic neo-fascist hell (although it’s not remotely interested in exploring any, you know, actual ideas within this context). It works its way up to some dumbass third-act twists that are raring and ready for the cutting-room floor, because what is a modern film if it isn’t overtly or secretly about trauma? All this brouhaha is little more than a headache waiting to happen.
Our Call: Boy Kills World kills brain cells. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.