Boy Kills World Review: Pennywise, Pound Fuel-ish

It’s easier to explain, by all the evidence, why I should love Boy Kills World, than it is to understand why I don’t. There’s plenty here to like when it comes to individual moments, especially if absurdly bloody, video game-styled fights are things you tend to enjoy. Yet something about the way they’re all strung together doesn’t quite work — the world-building is too slapdash to make much sense, but the tone never gets as campy as the over-the-top gore (and Sam Raimi‘s producing credit) might suggest.

Splintering

The old joke about the underlying plot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a martial arts master saves four orphans and trains them to murder his rival — is made overt text here. Instead of four turtles, substitute one boy; in place of Splinter, there’s the Shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian), who moves like a wild quadruped, and bites like one too. Boy, who never gets a more formal name, is played by former Pennywise Bill Skarsgard (yes, he does the eye thing in one scene) with an inner voice provided by Bob’s Burgers/Archer star H. Jon Benjamin.

Boy had his eardrums torched with hot pokers and his tongue cut out at a young age, and can’t remember what he sounds like, so he imagines his inner monologue as the narrator of a popular arcade fighting game he used to play — something Benjamin would indeed be perfect for, if he hasn’t already done one somewhere.

The combination of action star and comedian voice already worked pretty well in Twisted Metal, with Will Arnett voicing Samoa Joe’s Sweet Tooth. Benjamin gets to have more fun as an unheard-by-most thought narration, especially during interactions with a character whose lips Boy cannot read, so he invents the closest approximation. He sort-of does dialogue in moments that involve hallucinations of Boy’s young sister, who can hear him, and his heightened verbal reactions to key moments are a hoot. They’re also inconsistent — at times there are long stretches without Benjamin, and they’re generally the worse for it.

Koy Pond

So much for the Boy; what about the “World”? Well, it’s a vague, future-ish dystopia — we know this because plants are growing on the outsides of skyscrapers — that mostly looks like a studio backlot, some parking lots and soundstages, and a mansion interior. One family, the Van Der Koys, runs everything, and they’re wonderfully cast: Famke Janssen, Michelle Dockery, Sharlto Copley and Brad Gelman, all looking like the last people who should ever be entrusted with power, but the first who’d insist upon it as a birthright. Hilda (Janssen) is the matriarch-dictator, who every year does a version of the Hunger Games that kills all her political rivals. This is what orphaned Boy years ago, and he’s been training for revenge ever since.

As in many martial-arts exploitation movies, the plot doesn’t really matter so much as it serves as a conduit from one fight scene to another. With stuntman/fight choreographer Dave Szatarski (Black Widow, Kingsman: The Golden Circle) in charge of the crazy-gory battles, all set to music as if they were dance numbers, that doesn’t sound so bad. The problem is that every fight is edited in drop-frame stutter mode, making them all a headache to follow with the naked eye. Typically this kind of effect is used to hide the fact that the actors aren’t very good at the battles in real time, but with the extremely physical Skarsgard and martial-arts expert Ruhian involved, that surely can’t be the case here. We’re left to conclude that director Moritz Mohr made an aesthetic choice…and a wrong one.

Survivor, No Series

With the fights left hard to follow, what about the plot? Trailers have suggested that Boy enters some sort of TV death game to gain his revenge, but in actuality that idea lasts for about one fight scene before the plot moves on. And when the Van Der Koys flip the script on Boy late in the game, forcing him to question what he knows, it’s not clear that all the story logic holds up.

The score by video game composer Ludvig Forssell and multi-instrumentalist Leon Michels does the most work towards creating a coherent atmosphere. Simultaneously trancey and propulsive, it feels like it’s sucking you into a fighting game just like the one that gave Boy his voice.

Bill Coming Due?

When a movie’s not even trying to be much more than a gory grindhouse flick, it’s arguably unfair to expect too much of what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “plot to get in the way of the story.” Nonetheless, with the stunt talent and great gore effects involved, it would have been nice to be able to appreciate the fights more. Skarsgard may have a decent future in this kind of genre; indeed, we’ll soon see how he does following Brandon Lee as The Crow. Mohr, however, should have been able to do much more, no pun intended, with what he had here.

Grade: 2.5/5

Boy Kills World opens in theaters April 26th.