‘Boy Kills World’ Review: Dear God, Make It Stop
Moritz Mohr’s meta-actioner Boy Kills World desperately wants to be a cross between Deadpool, Silent Night, and The Hunger Games, but its tropes and tools completely sinks the movie.
On paper, Boy Kills World has the makings of a fairly decent actioner - a deaf and mute protagonist (Bill Skarsgård) is on a revenge-fueled path to kill Hilda van der Koy (Famke Janssen), who murdered his mother and sister in front of him when he was a ‘boy’ (hence the title). He has trained with the Shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruihan, pitifully wasted) to perfect his killing machine skills and decides that on the day of the “Culling” (basically their version of The Hunger Games), today’s the day to not only kill Hilda, but her sister, Melanie (Michelle Dockery) and husband Glen (Sharlto Copley), alongside other siblings Gideon (Brett Gelman) and “June 27” (Jessica Rothe).
Yes, it’s been treated before in recent titles like John Woo’s Silent Night, which saw a mute electrician go down a dark path after his wife and son were killed. But the potential for originality is still there, as there’s so much one can do by experimenting with images and sounds, particularly in relation to its deaf/mute protagonist with the outside world. But director Moritz Mohr and screenwriters Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers make the cardinal sin of never engaging with its image and sound-making and instead placate a voiceover narration from H. Jon Benjamin that acts as Boy’s internal voice as he rakes up the body count.
This wouldn’t be bad if the narration served any purpose to Boy’s internal plight, but it instead completely detaches itself from the images on screen, often providing unnecessary audio commentary and diluting any attempt at emotional investment. A couple of neat drone shots of Boy parkouring down the streets are completely hindered by Benjamin’s meta-narration, which is always spoken in the third degree, in an ironic tone. But none of the comedy ever lands since Skarsgård’s performance never once fits with Benjamin’s narration.
It’s almost as if Mohr added Benjamin’s narration after the fact, thinking the movie needed other elements to spice up the action and make its story funnier. But it doesn’t need it. In fact, it would’ve been better without it. That’s not something I usually say when criticizing a film because the finished product obviously had an authorial imprint behind it, and distinct choices are made by the filmmaker that set it apart from other movies. However, this singular choice ensures there will be zero attachment to the character since his facial performance never matches what his ‘internal voice’ tells him to do.
And why tarnish such a brilliant physical performance from Skarsgård with a voice like this? Not that I have anything against Benjamin (he’s certainly incredibly entertaining as Archer), but the skill an actor must possess to convey everything he wants the audience to know through his eyes and body language is something few actors know how to do well. Skarsgård has already proven himself up to the task through his facial expressions as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Andy Muschietti’s It and as the Marquis de Gramont in Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 4, so we already know he’ll commit no matter what.
He certainly does, and in the case of this character, actions speak louder than words. But when Benjamin’s constant yapping hinders our appreciation of Skarsgård’s actions, there’s a massive problem. It also doesn’t help that the narration often distorts reality and fiction, often creating a narrative that gets way too muddled in what’s real and a fabric of Boy’s imagination. Even worse, none of the action scenes work. Mohr and cinematographer Peter Matjasko have no idea where to place the camera during tight moments of one-on-one combat, frequently creating nauseating frames as one tries to figure out exactly what’s happening. The film is also hacked to bits, with odd jump cuts hindering any sense of rhythm and kinetics on display, despite its incredibly bloody hard-R rating.
Mohr does try to infuse some energy and movement with several moments shot in FPV drones. But he severely lacks the artistic skill necessary for these shots to feel grandiose and enhance the action on display like Michael Benjamin Bay and Roberto De Angelis treated the drone in the heat of Ambulance’s central thesis or in how Lokesh Kanagaraj appropriated it for a literal bird’s eye view in Leo. There’s no artistic intention in Mohr’s use of drones other than “it’ll look cool.” Some of the shots certainly do, but they’re never emotionally invested enough because the rest of the action is so poorly staged and shot that the impact of seeing a drone observe the sequence from another point of view is minimal.
After what seems like an eternity, the film arrives at its climax, where a massive twist changes the story's direction, adding a good half-hour or so to the proceedings. As cool as it could’ve been if treated with care, it also indicates the central problem plagues Boy Kills World. It’s a film that attempts to be a hyper-stimulating knockoff of Deadpool and The Hunger Games without any real sense of identity it attempts to throw everything at a wall and see what sticks: loud, overbearing, self-aware voiceover narration, bloody fight sequences, multiple twists, and post-credit scenes in an attempt to make the audience care about what they’re seeing. But all I wanted to do was escape the cinema as soon as humanly possible and not hear another word out of that incredibly grating internal voice. Perhaps if Mohr knew how to shoot action, it would’ve been somewhat fun, but alas.