Boy Kills World – first-look review

Vio­lence is upset­ting only until it becomes fun­ny; Looney Tunes teach­es us this, that going far enough over the top removes the ele­ment of real­ism that gives acts of phys­i­cal harm their pow­er. Slit­ting someone’s throat can be grue­some, but bash­ing some­one over the head with a mal­let so their teeth all stick out like piano keys — now there’s comedy.

But the corol­lary secret to Bugs and Daffy’s suc­cess was the child­like inno­cence to their mis­chief, a com­ic-strip sim­plic­i­ty in gags sel­dom more mature or involved than your giv­en knock-knock joke. And if Looney Tunes works because it thinks the way a kid does, then the com­pa­ra­bly slap-hap­py Boy Kills World fails because it has the men­tal­i­ty of a four­teen-year-old boy com­ing off a three-day, Moun­tain Dew-fueled Xbox bender.

From the open­ing expo­si­tion intro­duc­ing dic­ta­trix Hil­da ven der Koy (Famke Janssen) as a ​“bitch” in need of elim­i­na­tion to the utter­ances of such ama­teur-hour pro­fan­i­ties as ​“fuck­pup­pet” and ​“shitweasel,” a bru­tal­iz­ing lack of wit makes a slog out of a beat-‘em-up that aspires to a non-stop bar­rage of bone-break­ing gut­busters. (There’s also a touch of Whe­do­n­speak dropped into this dialect of uncool­ness.) For all its cre­ativ­i­ty about the dif­fer­ent ways limbs can made to bend, the script face­plants in its dull qua­si-ado­les­cent sen­si­bil­i­ty that pairs the juve­nile affin­i­ty for sug­ary cere­als and Mor­tal Kom­bat with a more grat­ing­ly sopho­moric stunt­ed­ness in humor. One imag­ines Dead­pool look­ing down at his own hands in impo­tent hor­ror, Oppen­heimer-style, reck­on­ing with what he hath wrought.

Our unnamed deaf-mute pro­tag­o­nist (Bill Skars­gård, his arms like rock­et launch­ers) can com­mu­ni­cate only in inter­nal mono­logue voiceover that, despite the many tribu­la­tions he’s sur­vived since the reign­ing jun­ta killed his fam­i­ly, has the same obliv­i­ous cheer­ful­ness as the pup­py Will Fer­rell voiced in last month’s Strays. And this Boy is a good dog indeed; from his old­er Asian men­tor com­pli­cat­ing a South African set­ting with a staunch refusal to con­sid­er its depic­tion of fas­cism rel­a­tive to race, he’s learned to sit, stay, and make dead.

He’s got to fight through the roy­al strong­hold on the night of the rul­ing family’s lat­est ​“culling,” work­ing his way from one lev­el to the next in a video game struc­ture the script acknowl­edges with unclever men­tion of a ​“final boss.” The least tire­some pas­sages come dur­ing these long arias of sav­agery, with Tilt-a-Whirl cin­e­matog­ra­phy rush­ing to catch every lac­er­a­tion and head­shot. State-of-the-art fight chore­og­ra­phy, as well as a resource­ful spir­it that sees every prop as a poten­tial weapon, have both been squan­dered in an oth­er­wise repel­lent, paper-thin plot­line build­ing to a non­sen­si­cal twist.

First-time direc­tor Moritz Mohr made an unmis­tak­able call­ing card fea­ture, prov­ing beyond reproach his skill as an orches­tra­tor and styl­ist of action, though he’s most well-suit­ed to the upper­most ech­e­lons of today’s Hol­ly­wood in his total dis­re­gard for sto­ry beyond its capac­i­ty to cue up emp­ty bom­bast. That’s how a film with bare­ly any plot bal­loons to an unac­count­able run time of near­ly two hours, as it piles on one dis­play of hol­low tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty after the next with no con­cern for wear­ing out its welcome.