Boy Kills World, the new action comedy opening this weekend, feels like a video game come to life. Specifically, Mortal Kombat. The protagonist, who is deaf, doesn’t speak and is known simply as “Boy”, says as much when he explains that the voice we hear throughout as his inner monologue was chosen from his favorite childhood video game, a Mortal Kombat-esque two-player fighting game he played with his dead sister.
Said sister died, along with their parents, when the boy and his family were marked for death in the annual Culling, in which the Van Der Koys, the ruling family of the film’s post-apocalyptic world, round up and assassinate their enemies. Rescued and trained until adulthood by a feared and legendary Shaman (Yayan Ruhian), the Boy gets in a series of increasingly wild and bloody fights as he finally decides to take revenge on the Van Der Koys one by one until he reaches Hilda (Famke Janssen), the mad matriarch who personally killed his family.
While the basic plot of Boy Kills World is fairly serious, it quickly establishes that this is a parody and we’re meant to have fun. H. Jon Benjamin, who voices the Boy (he’s played by Bill Skarsgård as an adult and Nicholas Crovetti as a child) and who easily has the most dialogue of any character, is most associated with comedies like Archer and Bob’s Burgers and his mere presence gives the sense that this is all for fun. Likewise, the cast is filled with comedy actors. There’s Sharlto Copley as Gideon Van Der Koy, the idiot in-law whose loyalties shift at the first sign of danger. There’s Glen (Brett Gelman) who is at one point described as so dumb that he couldn’t, “shit in a toilet without instructions.” There’s Andrew Koji as Basho, one of the crazy, anti-Van Der Koy sidekicks the Boy picks up along the way and his partner in crime, Benny (Isaiah Mustafa), who spends the whole film speaking in utter nonsense because the Boy can’t read his lips. Each character is played with a knowing smile and the broad comedy beats keep the audience from taking anything that happens too seriously.
Really, the only thing that the film and director Moritz Mohr take seriously is the action, which is filmed thrillingly and frenetically. Skarsgård, who has spent much of his career to this point playing weirdos, is buff and beautiful here, his ripped if svelte frame the perfect vehicle for the Boy’s years of hard training and single-minded quest for revenge.In one of the film’s best sequences, he, Basho and Benny fight the armed mascots of a kids’ cereal brand who—thanks to a marketing tie-in—have been tasked with murdering this year’s culling victims. Cinematographer Peter Matjasko’s camera (presumably thanks to a drone) swoops through the action in one dizzying long take after another. The scene is both gleefully fun and utter anarchy and the film works best when it focuses on the violent, bloody video game-esque action.
Where the film falters is in justifying all that action. Scene after scene is filled with exposition on how evil the Van Der Koys are. Yet whenever they’re confronted with consequences for their evil, the family members seem almost relieved that they might lose power. Certainly, one could argue that fatigue suggests they are so corrupted by power that they’ve even become exhausted at their struggle to keep it. They’re evil, but fundamentally ridiculous and the satisfaction of watching the Boy take out each minor boss in succession becomes less and less satisfying as the film goes on. Still, perhaps that wouldn’t matter so much if the film’s revolutionary spirit went nowhere in the last act.
Basho and Benny ostensibly join the Boy’s crusade because they also hate the Van Der Koys. We like them, so we assume the film’s revenge plot will, on some level, satisfy their fight to overthrow the ruling family. Instead, the film essentially drops that thread in the last act as it stacks twists and bloody fights on top of each other. Admittedly, the film’s plotting and character work to that point is so haphazard that we scarcely care anyway, but when all is said and done, that lack of a satisfying narrative ultimately leaves the film feeling like a bit empty of fun.
Though Boy Kills World’s script uses buzzy ideas of revolution and eating the rich to give its story stakes and motivation, those threads become incidental by the film’s end. Instead, the film is merely a bloody, ribald parody of revenge movies. It takes images and ideas familiar to modern filmgoers and lampoons them to the point that sometimes the audience is left wondering if it’s been let in on the joke. It’s a crowd-pleaser to be sure, but its delights are like cotton candy: light and delicious in the moment, but ultimately not very filling.
Boy Kills World opens in theaters Friday.
