I've watched a lot of R-rated, ultra-violent, over-the-top action movies, and they rarely manage to get the combination of action and humor right. Either they come across as too mean-spirited, too vulgar, or just too silly. "Boy Kills World" is one of the better ones I've seen, largely because it understands that it is an adolescent fantasy, leans into the absurdity, and uses the common tropes of these stories to its advantage.
Our hero is a deaf-mute young man known only as Boy (Bill Sarsgaard), who has devoted most of his life to training for the day he'll take revenge against the people who killed his family. Under the tutelage of the cruel Shaman (Yayan Ruhian), he matures into a formidable badass. However, he's never really grown up. His internal monologue, voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, reveals that Boy is still immature after years of isolation - doing his best to look cool while mentally operating on the level of a twelve year-old video game loving kid. The only book he had access to was the dictionary, so he recites vocabulary and definitions to himself as part of his self-narration. He also regularly hallucinates his younger sister Mina (Quinn Copeland), who gives him someone to talk to.
And this is fine, because the dystopian world that Boy operates in works by a twelve year-old's logic. Boy's chief target is a paranoid tyrant named Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen). Her siblings Gideon (Brett Gelman) and Melanie (Michelle Dockery), and Melanie's husband Glen (Sharlto Copely) help her run an oppressive totalitarian regime that regularly guns people down with impunity. An annual "Culling" of the Van Der Koys' enemies is treated as a media spectacle, creating an opportunity to stage a vicious fight against costumed corporate mascots. "Boy Kills World" is the kind of movie where comic book and video game stylization is everywhere. There are all sorts of fun absurdist touches like Boy using a cheese grater as a weapon, and a Van Der Koy enforcer named June 27 (Jessica Rothe) wearing a helmet that displays pixel art and messages. My favorite running gag involves Boy teaming up with a couple of resistance fighters, Basho (Andrew Koji) and Benny (Isaiah Mustafa). Boy can't read Benny's lips, and because we're seeing everything from Boy's POV, Benny only speaks in a stream of gibberish words.
This sort of clever business could get tiresome in a hurry, but the movie wisely doesn't rely on its gimmicks too much. Directed by Moritz Mohr and written by Tyler Burton Smith Arend Remmers, the first two acts of the movie are great. It moves fast, the action is relentless, and Bill Skarsgaard (having a very busy year) has no trouble getting Boy's emotions across without a word. The humor is absurdist and silly, relying on a lot of visual gags and cartoon violence. I am not remotely surprised that spinoff video games and an animated tie-in series are supposedly in the works. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't carry through the whole film. The filmmakers can't seem to help themselves and get too serious in the third act. If this were a different kind of movie, the actors are good enough that they might have been able to pull off the tonal shift, but there's just not enough substance under all the antics for "Boy Kills World" to suddenly try to make us care at the last minute.
This is the first feature - or at least the first American feature - for a lot of the creatives involved, and I expect that they'll go on to bigger and better things. With "Boy Kills World" they've demonstrated a proficiency with the kind of kinetic action and mayhem that appeals to the young and anarchic, and hopefully they'll get more chances to improve. I definitely appreciate what they managed to accomplish here, even if I think the script could have used a few more passes, and given the supporting cast more to do. I fully expect to see these filmmakers picking up a franchise assignment eventually, and hopefully they'll find a more receptive audience in time.
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