Boy Kills World

dir: Moritz Mohr

2024

This film is absolutely brutal and absolutely frenetic and yet still doesn’t entirely work.

I can’t say I had a ball watching it for most of its running time, but at least during the majority of the action sequences I was thinking “damn, these are some incredibly strong action sequences”.

If there is a problem, and I’m not saying there is, necessarily, because after all it’s just my opinion, man, it’s that while a revenge epic with head smashing, limb tearing bone crunching action can be entertaining, something with this much voiceover or narration or anything where a voice is talking this fucking much, is never going to fly that well, no matter who you get in to do the voiceover.

Also, why is the main character a deaf mute?

I’m sure if you asked the screenwriters nicely, they’d say “Well, because…” and then they might trail off, thinking about how they can’t really remember, because they were stoned at the time, but there was some reason they thought it would be cool, and then they realised it would make the flick a headache to make, but then they pressed on because they didn’t want to admit it was a stupid idea.

There is no reason why the Boy of the title is deaf and mute. There is rarely a good reason in any movie to have a character be deaf or mute, unless you’re adding something to give the character obstacles to overcome, or something for the character to come to terms with in order to understand themselves or the people they care about or some other bullshit. Or, you know, casting a person who is deaf and mute, with all that it entails, and the representation it brings.

And to then have a voice as recognisable as H. Jon Benjamin, I mean come on. I have actually read that when the film was first completed and shown at some film festivals, all the narration originally was done by Bill Skarsgård himself. And then either audiences didn’t care or the producers got antsy and thought “let’s bring in a comic-type voice guy and try to make it more of a jokey-larf comedy type thing”

How do you like it now? The voice, I’m sorry, it works for the main characters in Bob’s Burgers and Archer, but they’re animated tv shows. This is a movie, with a deranged looking young human as main character, butchering his way through this strange kingdom which somehow turns out to be South Africa. And the constant narration made it feel like I was watching a movie with the commentary feature turned on so some person unconnected to the movie was making wisecracks every five seconds, with few of their remarks landing, if ever.

It’s not good. As a depiction of mental illness, well, it’s a pretty shambolic shemozzle that keeps undercutting itself, if that’s what we were seeing. It essentially turns almost every aspect of the main character’s existence into a goofy joke.

It also leans into cartoonish elements or what it thinks are video game or comic book elements, in order to cover for the very gruesome nature of the action, and the overall totalitarian imagery that goes along with the fascistic iconography. AND there’s some kind of media critique aspect to it, which is very pretentious claptrap, and all of which that detracts and distracts from the brutal, very well choreographed and well filmed action.

Skarsgård also really, really happens to look the part. The part is of a young man trained from childhood to be a weapon of murderous revenge, with a body to match. The Shaman (Yayan Ruhian) grabs this child, apparently, and brutalises him for, I dunno, twenty years in a jungle somewhere. The jungle is in a country ruled by a family that came to power just before the Boy lost his mother and sister. The Van Der Koys rule this made up country not only with iron fists but with public executions, colourful marketing and arbitrary murders in order to either keep the people in line or to keep aggravating them, not sure which. The mute Boy thinks about nothing other than killing the Van Der Koys, especially the matriarch, Hilda (Famke Janssen).

And, maybe, because of grief, because of abuse, or deprivation or drugs, the kid also hallucinates frequently. Really comically antic kind of bullshit, that doesn’t really amuse me that much. There’s also a bit later on when the Boy, mishearing, so to speak, the dialogue spoken by a character with a beard, imagines or hallucinates all sorts of goofy shit, which, yeah, I rolled my eyes a bit.

The thing about flicks like this, hyperviolent but also desperate to be seen as clever, cool and edgy, is the problem of tone. When you make grim dark flicks about men consumed by the need to exact revenge, and you make everything dark and bone-crunchy, well, you’re catering to a certain kind of audience (bored middle-aged men). When you make everything colourful and jokey, you’re presumably catering to a younger audience, but, really, none of the youngs were ever going to see this either. So much appalling carnage is done to human bodies in this flick that by the time there is the televised madness of The Culling, which borrows less from The Hunger Games, and looks more like the Professor Genki murder gameshow from the Saints Row games, you think “there was never a chance that this was ever going to be seen by more than a new hundred people.”

One of the most absolutely brutal and bloodthirsty flicks I’ve ever seen was an Indonesian movie called The Night Comes for Us by Timo Tjahjanto, who made a Hong Kong so violent and so accomplished that there’s no way the Chinese government would allow the flick to be shown in Hong Kong these days. I mention it because I feel pretty sure the people that made this saw that.

Also, it’s not a coincidence to me that Indonesian badass Yayan Ruhian is in this flick as the Shaman. He wasn’t in that Indonesian flick I just referred to, but he played an incredibly memorable character in The Raid. He’s a skilled martial artist in the discipline of pencak silat, but is also one of the rare practitioners of onscreen violence where I sometimes worry he’s actually killing people for real, because he’s just that fucking ferocious.

And he’s only like five foot tall.

He is so memorable in The Raid that I still get chills thinking about his bastard of a character from the fight he has midway through the flick with one of the good guy cop characters. Let’s just say that the good guy character does not survive that fight, and afterwards, convinced that I had watched a goddamn hate crime, felt compelled to check IMDB just to make sure that the actor he annihilated actually survived the movie.

He’s not as terrifying here, because the flick is so goofy, but he has some horrifically brutal fights in this flick that amount to slaughters as well, and also frequently mutilates our main character. He’s just so fucking nasty. I’m sure he’s a lovely man in real life, but after watching this he’s going to replace the giant spiders in my nightmares at least for a while longer.

He has cause to want to end the Van Der Koys, very good cause, but it’s clear he’s less a Yoda to our young Boy, and more of a Darth Vader himself, just with even more evil fighting skills.

What’s not really clear, a lot of the time, is whether what Boy is seeing is real or hallucinations, nor does the plan of how he’s meant to get revenge actually ever make sense. Sure, whenever he fights legions of gun-toting goons he’s able to rip their arms and heads off and dodge their bullets, but no one person has ever toppled an entire corrupt regime, no matter how much of a ninja.

I mean, it takes at least three people, you’d think, to beat an army and take over a country.

I may sound like I’m mostly down on the flick, but there are other aspects I enjoyed, watching this. One of the Van Der Koys is Gideon, played by Brett Gelman, a frustrated artist who dresses like a 70s pimp, and delivers every line of dialogue like he’s in a Dostoevsky novel or like he’s yelling at Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I find him delightful, and since Boy only acts with guns, fists and feet, and occasionally with his eyes, it’s up to Brett Gelman to take up the acting slack for all the other characters. Gelman is probably best known for playing the loony conspiracy theorist character Murray in Stranger Things who stuck around, like many of the characters, far longer than you thought he would. Still, he’s great, and kinda desperate in everything he’s in, and I kinda have a soft spot for him. His character here is grandiose and kinda weird, but he has more personality than any of the other Van Der Koys, who I am not going to list by character name or actor, because honestly, no-one could possibly give a fuck. They’re only there for the Boy to kill them, and they’re the barest of straw man characters.

Boy will punch and kick his way to the top of the hierarchy to slay all the mobs, mini-bosses and then ultimate bosses, and I dare anyone outside of Bill Skarsgard’s family of like 11 brothers and sisters to even care. Even his dad Stellan will probably grunt and say to him “never got through it” even though Bill sent him a free copy on VHS, maybe.

But that’s okay. Terrific hyper-kinetic fights, terrible premise, awful voiceover, gory and absurdist palette and convoluted action, forced family back story crap, and a final boss of terrifying ferocity.

And a post credits scene. Make sure you don’t miss that one *he said with a sigh*.

6 points purely for the action and for Bill’s steely, walnutty musculature out of 10

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“This time we're going to make it. From now on we make our own rules. Nobody tells us what to do. I'm going to take us far away from this totalitarian hellhole.” – I’m sure all the 14 year old boys in the audience really appreciated those keen, edgelord words - Boy Kills World

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3803825689/?playlistId=tt13923084&ref_=tt_o...