Film Review - Boy Kills World
Mortiz Muhr's brutally violent revenge actioner fails to raise much excitement
As Vyvyan from cult BBC sitcom The Young Ones once said: “Even mindless violence seems boring today.” That certainly applies to Boy Kills World; yet another ultra-violent revenge action film cut from a similar cloth to the likes of John Wick (2014), Monkey Man (2024), and various Quentin Tarantino films, but with a try-hard attempt at offbeat eccentricity that’s clearly hoping for cult status. I’m not sure posthumous audiences will bestow such a hallowed honour on this largely tedious watch, but who knows? Plenty of dreadful films wind up with a cult following, as it isn’t really about the quality of the film in question; The Room (2003) being the ultimate example.
Set in a half-baked dystopian city with plot elements cut and pasted from The Hunger Games (2012) as well as the aforementioned revenge flicks, the film introduces the titular “Boy” (Bill Skarsgård, with Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti playing younger versions of the character). Following the murder of his mother (Rolanda Marais) and beloved younger sister (Quinn Copeland) at the hands of villainous dictator Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) during one of her “cullings”, Boy is rescued and then trained by a random shaman in a forest (Yayan Ruhian) to take revenge. Boy is also mute, for reasons later revealed, but his story is narrated by an inner voice he took from a Mortal Kombat-esque video game he and his sister used to play at an arcade. Much ultra-gory violence follows, with twists and turns that are largely predictable.
The biggest problem with this film is one simply does not give twin defecations about any of the characters, including Boy. We’re never told enough about them, or given any proper sense of their struggle or pain. Dark humour would have helped, and Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmer’s script tries to give us that, but the jokes seldom land — or at least, they didn’t with me. The film also feels overlong at 110 minutes, which isn’t surprising, considering director Mortiz Muhr is expanding on an earlier short film (which I haven’t seen).
Perhaps action aficionados may get more from this film than I did. After all, it essentially delivers on its title, and the many ludicrous fight scenes are exceptionally brutal — including the nastiest use of a cheese grater this side of Evil Dead Rise (2023). But despite Muhr’s undoubted prowess in staging well-choreographed and insanely bloody set pieces, none of them stick in the memory or particularly excite. Again, for me, it comes back to caring about the characters, and I simply don’t.
The cast try their best, and I’ll admit I did laugh a little at the bickering between sub-villains Glen Van Der Koy (Sharlto Copley) and Gideon Van Der Koy (Brett Gelman), but it doesn’t help that Boy’s inner voice isn’t that of Skarsgård. I appreciate the filmmakers are attempting parody by using H Jon Benjamin instead, but the whole conceit just puts even more distance between the audience and the protagonist.
In the end, Boy Kills World is a proficiently assembled film to which I am utterly indifferent. For ultraviolent action completists only.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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Had me at cheese grater.