Review: 'Boy Kills World' is a bloody mess of an action movie, whose brains don't quite match its bravado
The blood-drenched action orgy of “Boy Kills World” should be everything a lover of over-the-top mayhem could hope for — breathtaking martial-arts moves, copious violence and bodies splattering like ketchup bottles dropped from a great height.
So why does this exercise in excess by rookie German director Moritz Mohr feel so draining? I think it’s because the movie can’t resist nudging the viewer in the ribs every five minutes to point out how clever it thinks it is.
The movie’s title hero, known to us only as Boy, is interoduced as a child (played by Nicholas and Cameron Crovetti), ruthlessly trained by a character known as Shaman (played by the Indonesian martial-arts star Yayan Ruhian) to be a killing machine. Boy is taught, quite brutally, to sacrifice all comfort and emotion to train his body to kill Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the oligarch who runs the nearby city-state.
Boy believes that Hilda is responsible for killing his mother and forever separating him from his sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), whom Boy sees as a hallucination or imaginary friend. Boy is deaf and mute, but can understand people by reading their lips — though it’s an imperfect skill. Boy also listens a lot to a voice in his head, his inner narrator, a voice based on a video game character (provided for the movie by H. Jon Benjamin, known for his roles in “Bob’s Burgers” and “Archer”).
Boy grows up under Shaman’s regimen, and as an adult (played by Bill Skarsgard) is determined to get close enough to Hilda to kill her. That’s easier said than done, with Hilda locked away somewhere in the city, surrounded by a security squad led by the toughest fighter of all, known as June 27 (Jessica Rothe). Boy finds help from two resistance fighters, Basho (“Bullet Train’s” Andrew Koji) and Bennie (Isaiah Mustafa).
The plan is to get to Hilda through the Culling, the semi-annual ritual Hilda uses to maintain her reign of terror, where dissidents are rounded up to fight in a televised death match. Hilda’s son Glen (Sharlto Copley) is the Culling’s on-air emcee, though the brains of the operation are his wife, Melanie (Michelle Dockery), who produces the spectacle, and his brother Gideon (Brett Gelman), who writes the scripts.
There should be plenty of room in all this choreographed madness for some biting satire of the Van Der Koy’s fascist rule, the corrosive effect of TV violence or, you know, any of the targets writers Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers devise in the set-up. But the movie misses major opportunities to show it’s got brains behind the bashing.
Eventually “Boy Meets World” disappoints, delivering lots of punches but never landing a moment that’s a true knockout.
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‘Boy Kills World’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, April 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, language, some drug use and sexual references. Running time: 115 minutes.