It’s been almost a week since I saw this movie during a Screen Unseen event, which means I outran the savage reviews of this movie by a few days, but if you haven’t read the reviews that call this a “a discount dystopian hellscape” or “generic” or “favoring violent shocks over” compelling storytelling, or calling the main character (Skarsgard) a “saucer-eyed dynamo with an uninteresting back story who can neither hear nor talk” .
Boy Kills World is Moritz Mohr’s first shot at directing with an assist from Sam Raimi producing and for what it’s worth, this is probably exactly what you were hoping for if you came in with the trailer in mind. Jon Benjamin’s voice acting does add to a movie which lacks almost any other original plot points, making it feel instantly like the film has found a way to Mystery Science Theater itself, though there are moments when the inner monologue feels like it’s played up for the sake of silliness and not actually logical to the plot, like the way that the Boy chooses to nod his head and assent to a plan he doesn’t understand in order to seem affable.
Casting for this movie is a beautiful list of C-list character actors who are all perfectly evil, grungy, and unhinged, from the gross guy from Netflix’s Love/Stranger Things to Sharlto Copley doing that thing where he’s in two movies at the same time this weekend (see Monkey Man)! Copley’s character arguing with his brother-in-law is an early show stopper scene, and all the sibling scenes in general are hilariously mean. The crew of rebels is a lot smaller than I was expecting it to be, which isn’t a bad thing: two guys and an imaginary sister means that you can move into the infiltration portion of the film pretty quickly. And it totally works. By the time we’re fighting Cereal Hunger Games on live television (the greatest scene in the movie, I argue–RIP Octo-thief), they’ve established enough of a report that we feel for every bone-crunching punch and bullet wound.
The movie is kind of predictable in a dumb way, so transparently obvious that it feels like there should be some kind of trick that you’re missing, but I guess it gives you a new kind mental feat which is to identify the set of circumstances that will reveal how two people will learn their parentage and team up for the final boss fight. On this point, I feel like it’s easier if I just ruin a plot point and tell you that (spoiler) the Boy is going to find his long lost sister who he thought was dead, and, in the exact same twist as (spoiler) Argyle, the way he’s been misled is by intense drug-induced hypnosis which has forced him to forget who his true parents were. The fact that Boy Kills World shares its biggest, dumbest twist with Argyle really does make it seem like neither film should be worth your attention, but if you’re into cheese-grater combat and you didn’t get enough of it in Monkey Man, you really can get your fill in Boy Kills World.
“The dystopia,” Friend says, “of creeping jungle doesn’t really lend itself to plausible world building.” “Where are we?” was the other way he put it, and I guess I noticed and then quickly shut my own brain off. The movie sort of has Creator Vibes in terms of its Southeast Asian setting. It doesn’t make a lot of sense because it’s pretty clear we’re in America, but whatever, something something something we needed to film in Malaysia to make something work, I get it.
Polygon’s review gets it right when it mentions the mismatch between the combat of the rest of the movie vs the ending and the way that the violence is focalized in an interesting way for the final battle:
The smirky way director Moritz Mohr frames combats around video game references — complete with voice-over narration saying things like “Fatality!” and “Player two wins!” — doesn’t exactly prepare viewers for a face-off where the combatants’ pain meaningfully matters and the characters actually seem to be getting hurt….
But that final fight gives Boy Kills World more weight than the rest of its run time, and opens it up to action and martial arts fans who might otherwise be put off by the movie’s strident, referential humor.
Tasha Robinson, Polygon April 26, 2024
The Boss Battles are a set of ever-increasing headfakes and silliness, rachet up in creativity until the last one which is sort of horrible (it damsels one of the most badass characters when it could’ve let them fight it out the way Shang-Chi should’ve ended!). The talon weapon as an Easter egg to the plot is satisfying as a structural ending, because its importance to the end is sort of mentioned in a meta way earlier.
Is this a “good” movie? No. Is it one that you will regret seeing if you’re only 60% sure it’s what you’re going to see and the other 60% thinks it might be some random horror film slated for a June release or whatever? Yeah, sure. If you are on a blind movie date and it ends up being this, I think you’ll be pleasantly happy, but don’t, like, seek it out or something.
