Boy Kills World is only in UK and Irish cinemas April 26, 2024 from Signature Entertainment.
Synopsis
Skarsgård stars as Boy, a deaf-mute with a vivid imagination, driven by his inner voice, one which he co-opted from his favourite childhood video game. He avows revenge after his family is murdered by Hilda Van Der Koy, the deranged matriarch of a corrupt post-apocalyptic dynasty that left the boy orphaned, deafened, and voiceless. Boy trains with a mysterious shaman to become an instrument of death and is set loose on the eve of the annual culling of dissidents. Bedlam ensues as Boy commits bloody martial arts mayhem, inciting a wrath of carnage and bloodletting. As he tries to get his bearings in this delirious realm, Boy soon falls in with a desperate resistance group, all the while bickering with the apparent ghost of his rebellious little sister.
Review
Kicking things off let me be clear, Boy Kills World might just be one of the most violent movies of 2024.
Set in a dystopian world where a family controls the land and has a firm grip on the people, selectively choosing anyone who plots or even plans to plot against them and then killing them on live TV as entertainment for the masses. Our titular hero who is just called ‘Boy’ (played by the talented and silent Bill Skarsgård) lost his family to one such event and after being beaten (and left deaf and mute) he was taken in by a shaman in the woods (played by Yayan Ruhian from The Raid movies). Flash forward to adulthood, a highly trained and highly vengeful Boy now seeks revenge on those who took his family from him.
The plot is wafer thin, it makes no secret of this. The world’s not deep, the characters are at best bosses from some hack and slash game from the PS2 era of storytelling. This is not a negative however. The film knows what it wants to deliver and that was the fighting and the humour which it handled in equal lefts and equal rights.
Some of these action heavy films lean towards a dark, tortured soul fighting back against an ‘evil force’ while Boy Kills World leans into its more abstract absurd premise which certainly adds a fun refreshing spin on the ever growing genre of badasses mowing their way through a sea of nameless foes.
Since Boy is deaf and a mute, the film decided to dip further into the comedic side of this instead of a heart wrenching feel. He has no memory of what he used to sound like so has replaced his inner voice with that of a fighting video game announcer from an old arcade game he used to play with his sister (voiced by the legendary H. Jon Benjamin famous for his vocal works on Archer and Bob’s Burgers). While Bill hands out the punches, kicks and gunshots with a flurry of facial expressions, H. Jon Benjamin delivers a plethora of awkward one liners of an immature mind trying to make sense of everything that’s unfolding around him.
Now the action scenes are really the films ‘bread and butter’. If humour was one of the pillars of this film, then the fight scenes are the second. The movie is one non stop thrill ride of punches, kicks, gunshots and more blood than the Overlook Hotel’s lift lobby!
As soon as Boy infiltrates the higher sections of this dystopian society, things escalate more and more until the climax leaving you at the edge of your seat and nearly exhausted from the tougher battles Boy faced.
While these fights are brutal in their execution and gore, they are not very deep, everything in the film is surface level enjoyment. Like watching a lets play of a gory ultra violent video game with boss levels every 20 minutes. Mixing the brutal and crazy fights (you will never look at cheese graters the same way again!) with the perfect line delivery of H. Jon Benjamin ties the entertaining factors of Boy Kills World together.
Verdict
Boy Kills World is a thoroughly enjoyable if not empty experience in the cinema. An entertaining cast and some truly intense fights littered throughout and its tongue firmly in its cheek, its entire premise is to mindlessly entertain which it delivers with unapologetic pride. The lead cast deliver some epic fight choreography and H. Jon Benjamin handles his signature awkward vocal tones made famous by Bob Belcher. Go see this in the cinema and just go in for the fun!
⭐⭐⭐⭐
