Editor’s Note: I reviewed Boy Kills World back when it showed as a part of TIFF’s Midnight Madness line-up in 2023. If you’re wondering why you can’t find the name H. Jon Benjamin anywhere in this review, it’s because Benjamin was hired after TIFF to replace Bill Skarsgaard as the narrator who provides the main character with his “internal monologue.” Perhaps this late addition has made the movie significantly better, but I genuinely doubt it — it’s what’s written that sucks, not the person saying it. But kudos to Mohr and company for trying to do something to fix a film that wasn’t working as well as it could. Here’s the original review. – NJ
On paper, Moritz Mohr’s Boy Kills World has everything going for it. You’ve got a pretty classic story – a young boy survives his family’s murder at the hand of a despot, is saved from his own annihilation from their hands by a wizened old master who agrees to train him in order for him to get his revenge, and becomes the kind of man who can straight-up rip a man’s trachea out of their neck as if it were a can of Mr. Pibb in a pizza place’s fridge – and a shockingly stacked cast assembled for a first feature. The cast is led by Bill Skarsgard, who saw what his brother did in The Northman and tried to top that without putting on too much muscle mass, and, as a result, is all tanned muscle and sinew without sacrificing the things that make him such a distinct screen personality from the rest of his family. He’s exceptionally expressive, which is especially well-suited to this role, given that the character is a deaf-mute, and he’s got a great sense of comic timing as well as the action chops to sell his badassery and one wonders whether John Wick might have had second thoughts if he’d seen this Bill Skarsgard show up to their duel. But he’s not where it ends: There are appearances by Sharlto Copley, Isaiah Mustafa, Brett Gelman, Jessica Rothe, Famke Janssen, Andrew Koji, and the legend himself, Yayan Ruhian.
Ruhian’s involvement is the kind of thing that makes an action nerd geek out upon seeing his name in the credits of a Midnight Madness selection in the TIFF program: He’s one of the big reasons why Gareth Evans’ The Raid kicked so much ass in the first place. And, to be fair, the fight scenes are the selling point of a feature like this, and Boy Kills World delivers often on that front. If you’ve ever wanted to see what it might look like if an action hero chose a cheese grater instead of a frying pan in a kitchen-based action sequence, congratulations, because your monkey’s paw officially has a newly curled finger. But before we dive deeper into those implications, let’s talk about gore. Much like is done in its Midnight Madness relative KILL, Mohr opts for a decent combination of digital splatter effects and practical ones, and it works well in combination. Mohr’s action is centered around speed and character movement, and with the locations featured in the film being vastly larger than a train car, it’s understandable why he’d focus heavier on the parkour-like movements of Skarsgard’s character. I usually hate drone-filmed action unless it’s done particularly elegantly, but the choppiness of the process here is a weirdly kinetic asset in Mohr’s arsenal. It is a little too shaky-cam heavy to resemble the kind of iconic action that the Indonesians perfected and exported over the last decade, but the fights are visceral enough to stand the test of a repeat viewing.
What won’t be nearly as durable is the film’s sense of humor, which frequently threatens to derail the entire enterprise. You’ve got a decently rendered post-apocalyptic world, in which the denizens of one of the last functional cities live in fear of their matriarch (Janssen), her goofy siblings (Dockery and Gelman), her TV showman brother-in-law (Copley), and her enforcer (Rothe), and a deaf-mute kung fu badass willing to take them down: isn’t this enough for an entertaining feature? Mohr sees this and chooses violence: he gives Skarsgard a narrated inner dialogue and, worse, a constant companion in an apparition of his dead sister, both operating on a kind of Garfield logic.
No one, save his imaginary sister, can hear his thoughts, but it sure as hell seems as if they can. For every time this gag is used in a funny manner – Skarsgard has trouble reading Mustafa’s lips, so every one of his lines is goofy babble, which translates to him imagining what he says as if it were the literal truth – there are four or five in which it falls absolutely flat, playing like an Asylum riff on the Deadpool franchise, which isn’t exactly the world’s best rip-off material to begin with. Hence, Reddit: Boy Kills World feels geared to the kind of viewer who seeks out a high-concept premise to either feel acknowledged by (see the Mortal Kombat references that Skarsgard spouts) or superior (the constant wink-wink attempts at subverting action movie or video game tropes) to the material.
In fact, Boy Kills World resembles Guns Akimbo, another high-concept Midnight Madness selection centered around stunt casting, enough to the point that one wonders whether an upcoming Maury episode will center around determining if Ryan Reynolds really is their father. This hyperactive annotation – a phenomenon well-known to the spouses of film critics – is inherently self-limiting when applied to the actual making of narrative art, be it cinematic or in any other medium. It wishes, above all else, to be seen as clever rather than competent, and the great tragedy of Mohr’s film is that it is far more competent than it is clever. What would be a thoroughly sturdy action film – one already receiving brownie points in the “clever” column for the excellent casting – turns into a contorted mess with the attention span of someone scrolling through a never-ending feed. There’s no building tension or narrative flow to be found, just sparks of life and interest before one goes straight back to rolling their eyes at shitposts.