“Boy kills world” – here is the review

“Boy kills world” is like watching someone else play

Published 2024-05-03 08.20

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full screen “Boy kills world” Photo: Graham Bartholomew

Boy kills world

Directed by Moritz Mohr, with Bill Skarsgård, Michelle Dockery, Famke Janssen, Yayan Ruhian

MOVIE REVIEW. Bloody and violent action thriller comedy where Bill Skarsgård plays a man trained in martial arts with revenge in mind.

ACTION/THRILLER/KOMEDI. In a dystopian future, a totalitarian and costumed ruler annually gathers all her enemies in the Gallring, and then pits them against each other in televised death matches. A deaf-mute boy is in hard training under a mysterious shaman (Yayan Ruhian) in order to one day become the ultimate warrior, a perfect weapon with one purpose: to avenge the brutal death of his family and kill Hilda van der Koy (Miss Janssen). Two training montages later, the boy is a man with (often zoomed in) muscles. Bill Skarsgård.

According to interviews, the German, feature film debutant director aimed Moritz Mohr on making a film that he and his friends wanted to see themselves, taking all of his “craziest, funniest ideas and throwing them into one big pot”. The result is 111 hypnotic, boyishly fun minutes with neither original nor particularly wacky ideas.

Comic book style is mixed with game ditto, “Hunger games” with “The Purge” and “John Wick”. On the way to the fight with the final boss, there will be parkour action and choreographed violence that is danced through futuristic environments, warehouses, restaurant kitchens and fluorescent green-tinted corridors with accessories such as hammers, samurai swords, firearms, meat axes, pickaxes and graters. Blood spurts, limbs are chopped off, faces are turned to mush and bones are broken. Schplatt, schplärgh, jump kick, round kick. Slow motion and the camera spinning around, around 360 degrees.

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full screen Bill Skarsgård in “Boy kills world” Photo: Roadside Attractions

Overall, “Boy kills world” is some kind of cinematic equivalent of watching some sad and manically joking acquaintance cum, and you quickly get the feeling that the movie went on too long. The fact that it opens in cinemas at the same time as the equally ultra-violent revenge film “Monkey Man” is not in the film’s favor either. The plot is basically the same, and while “Monkey man” isn’t that good either, it’s at least liberatingly gravely serious.

Bill Skarsgård and his guts do what they can with what they’re given, otherwise the biggest selling points seem to be that it’s festive that his inner monologue is done by voice actor Henry Jon Benjamin of “Archer” and “Bob’s Burgers,” and that the film is produced by Sam Raimi. It doesn’t go far enough.

Shown in cinemas.

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full screen “The Fall Guy” Photo: Universal Pictures

Instead, take the opportunity to see…

… cinema-current The Fall Guy, which delivers on both the action and comedy fronts. Also, the romance front.

Did you know that…

… there is grater violence also in the Sam Raimi-produced “Evil dead rise”?

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