BOY KILLS WORLD - Mark Reviews Movies

Boy Kills World, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 25, 2024

The title tells us exactly what the filmmakers want to do, and Boy Kills World certainly delivers some brutal and digitally bloody fights and shootouts. Then, though, there's the matter of how the movie attempts that goal, and the result is as confused as the movie's ambition is simple.

The plot of Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers' screenplay is a straightforward revenge tale. A young man has spent most of his life training in physical combat, to do nifty acrobatic maneuvers, and with assorted firearms so that he can kill the people who murdered his family. The setup is nothing new or special, but that's mostly unimportant to a movie's success or failure, as long as the filmmakers do something of note with such material.

Here, everything of some note leads to larger issues with the movie's intentions and tone. The hero isn't just set on killing any ordinary killers, for example. He's determined to kill the entire family who make up a corrupt and murderous totalitarian regime, which took over an unspecified country 25 years prior by force and uses an annual tradition of mass murder to keep the population in line.

That the movie doesn't have anything to say about this authoritarian rule, except that it's bad, and the rulers who abuse such power, except that they're the colorful villains of the story, makes one wonder why Smith and Remmers even bothered with such a loaded backdrop for an otherwise unambitious revenge thriller. To provide a guess, it probably makes this movie look more important than it actually is or, for that matter, wants to be.

There's an inherent cynicism to that, just as the movie's central gimmick gives a similar impression. It has our unnamed protagonist, known in the credits as Boy and played with admirable intensity by Bill Skarsgård, be silent. His thoughts are offered to us by the voice in his head, which is provided by the great comedic vocal actor H. Jon Benjamin. It's an amusing-enough gag, as Boy's thoughts run from bafflement when his plan doesn't quite go right to childish delight in slaughtering countless goons and a certain number of his specific targets. The running narration tells us we're not supposed to take any of this too seriously.

However, the story, characters, and political background of the material suggest the complete opposite. Is Boy's inner monologue really that funny, after all, when we discover why the character requires it in the first place? As a kid, he watched his mother and sister shot in front him, had his ear canals cauterized and his tongue cut out, was left for dead, and only survived by being rescued by the mysterious Shaman (Yayan Ruhian).

With all of that information, the narration seems less like a joke and more like the filmmakers being flippant about such physical and emotional trauma. That's not just reading into the surface of the movie, either. The movie itself more or less confirms it when things do become severe in the third act, and almost immediately, the inner monologue shuts up, lest we somehow miss that the comedy part of the narrative is finished.

It's strange how often and in how many ways this movie gets in its own way, considering how straightforward the basic plot is. After surviving his childhood torture and trauma, Boy is trained the Shaman for more than a decade, and although his mentor insists he isn't ready to face his foes, our hero decides to take action after watching members of the ruling family massacre a crowd of people. The complete anonymity of such events—from the fictional and nondescript setting, to the nameless and faceless masses of the oppressed, to the over-the-top villainy of the antagonists—only emphasizes that the filmmakers are using them to justify the thematic and political concerns of something like a cartoon.

Boy's targets certainly fit in that description, too. Melaine (Michelle Dockery) is a media-savvy manipulator, who arranges a televised spectacle of public executions on a winter wonderland set and performed by cereal mascots. Her husband Gideon (Sharlto Copley) is an egocentric buffoon, and her brother Glen (Brett Gelman) is an aspiring playwright so terrible that he can't even get a break by way of all-powerful nepotism. The youngest family member is June (Jessica Rothe), the helmeted head of security, and overseeing it all is Hilda (Famke Janssen), the dictator.

The whole of this is entirely an excuse for Boy to go to different locations—a mansion, the TV studio, some concrete fortress—and strike, stab, and shoot assorted henchmen. Director Moritz Mohr stages and films the action competently and, at times, with some flair, especially since longer takes and the moving camera let us appreciate the choreography and stunt work. It's generally impressive, even during the broad satire of the scene at the television studio.

Calling any part of Boy Kills World satire is generous, since the movie intentionally possesses no real ideas to mock. It definitely has the air of ridicule, although the humor comes across as thoughtless, shallow, and counterintuitive to the material's basic goals.

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