I wonder if one of the repercussions of the unexpected success of Everything Everywhere All at Once might be a new subgenre of frenetically shot action-comedies based around gonzo premises. The movie business is often one of witnessing rare original ideas take off and then expounding resources to copy it in both style and success as thoroughly and frequently as possible. It definitely appears that such thinking played some part in the creation of Boy Kills World, a wildly energized and flagrantly weird dystopia movie that might secretly be an attempt to adapt a new Street Fighter movie without having secured the rights. Certainly it makes no secret of its root inspiration in arcade fighter games, and sticks to that kind of general action apparatus in as competent a way as it can. But beyond that there’s definitely the sense of it trying too hard to capture a particular vibe that the movie itself can’t wholly define.
Directed by German filmmaker Mortiz Mohr, Boy Kills World is set in a totalitarian future resembling The Hunger Games where the ruling Van Der Koy family hosts a Culling every year of twelve civilians deemed enemies of the state who are killed on live television. Matriarch Hilda (Famke Janssen) executed the family of one nameless young boy, scorched his ears and cut out his tongue -but her nemesis Shaman (Yayan Ruhian) found him and raised him as a weapon of vengeance. Haunted by the memory of his beloved sister, the deaf-mute Boy (Bill Skarsgård) -now a fighting machine- is consumed by the singular vendetta of killing the Van Der Koys. Having lost all memory of his voice, he is propelled forward by an inner monologue derived from the arcade games he and his sister played as children; the inner monologue of H. Jon Benjamin.
Yes, H. Jon -voice of Sterling Archer and Bob Belcher- Benjamin. This may be the first sign of just how deranged the movie is going to be, taking that very distinctive voice and applying it to one of the least likely contexts for it -and one that ensures it can almost never be taken seriously, even when in mournful meditation over a lost sibling. Mohr does know when to cut it out of course -there’s some significant drama in the last act that he allows Skarsgård to play visually without the aid of surfer dude inner voice. Though just as often he matches the two performances in cornball ways -such as when Boy finds himself unable to interpret what a rebel called Benny (Isaiah Mustafa) is saying; Skarsgård’s expressive cluelessness matching Benjamin’s joke delivery in amusing chemistry.
As strange as it may be, Benjamin's voice is an effective choice for the tone that Mohr is going for, and more often than not Skarsgård’s performance rises to it. In spite of how grim some aspects of the story are (child mutilation, public execution, just general fascist authoritarianism), the film really plays at being unserious -Boy's uber-seriousness is indeed part of the joke. All of it is purely in service of the film's arcade fighter game stylistic proclivity. It is a textual device as well -Boy fairly literally sees himself as a video game protagonist, his inner monologue likening beats of his fights to special combos or finishing moves. The world itself seems built to be a video game for his desired context specifically. And of course in touch with that aesthetic the confrontations are violent, especially when Boy is going up against a "Boss".
But there's a considerable degree to which the movie is boxed in by its commitment to this very specific form, and struggles to reconcile its reality in any kind of a way to resonate. Indeed that reality is extraordinarily flat -and not just because the scene backdrops are so artificial they might as well be paper. It is an entirely unoriginal conception. I made the comparison earlier to The Hunger Games, and it really is so stark a model -which one might argue aligns it more with the often dull worlds of these kind of games, but isn’t much of an excuse in this medium and with this kind of story that hinges, on some level, on engagement with its own context. And that is already a difficult thing to achieve with the goofy tone that barely takes any of its violence and conflict seriously.
Like a fighting game it also blasts you with half-formed characters designed to look and act ‘cool’, but most of whom are ultimately expendable. Andrew Koji’s Basho (the dumbest name in the movie) comes in out of nowhere to fill the role of Boy’s co-op NPC for a few sequences before promptly exiting the movie. And there’s one mysterious enforcer figure, forecast as one of the heroes early on by her unwillingness to capture children, called June 27 (Jessica Rothe) who wears a helmet with a digital screen emitting various short exclamatory phrases. There’s no reason for it or for her face to be concealed at all (it’s revealed about the midpoint) when the mask really doesn’t do anything for her fighting capabilities -it’s just there to look cool and quirky by the writers’ subjectivity. Probably the worst example of sacrificing thematic cohesion for cool though comes near the end of the movie with a final boss fight included based on the match-up of its combatants and necessitating a betrayal of one of the movie’s implied main virtues.
That prioritized element and vigorous aesthetic does seem to be the defining factor behind much of the movie’s progression. It all has to hit this precise note of silly gnarliness -such as in a fight early on that is going for an extreme version of the Black Knight bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But a lot of the stuff is so amped in excess -to the violence, but more-so the editing- that it comes off as a little desperate. Even as it gets the moves right, it’s often not so articulated in the vein of arcade game combat as is its pretense. It’s too choppy and unhinged, and its aesthetic elements are bolder than they need to be. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World understood what it was doing in this capacity. Boy Kills World broadly cares about its vision matching up with its stated influence, but only as much as it crosses paths with a predetermined stylistic texture. A texture that is again trying hard to replicate a sort of whip-smart vibe seen in other movies of late, without fully understanding why those work for their specific movies.
The cast of can be silly enough, if rather odd in composition. It’s got Michelle Dockery as Brett Gelman’s sister -Gelman playing another variation of his Fleabag asshole character, but watered down. Sharlto Copley also is just doing another tired obnoxious idiot who becomes mildly interesting only within seconds of his death. But for everyone else, Skarsgård and Benjamin get the assignment and play their part modestly well. The movie is fun and entertaining in places; for the faltering way that they’re shot, there are some really successful action beats. I definitely feel that Mohr’s choices here would fit well in another kind of movie. But Boy Kills World is that strange movie that is both generic and stylized, yet each in the wrong places. It could have used originality in its storytelling and needed to tone down the excess in its aesthetics. Maybe Mohr should just have played a few more arcade games.
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