‘Boy Kills World’ is a senseless conflict with no one to root for
There is a kind of film that’s funny and absurdly violent and yet still makes you care about the characters. That’s what “Boy Kills World” seems to want to be, but isn’t.
“Boy Kills World” is rather the sort of movie that’s funny in a way that eliminates all possibility of a serious response and yet violent in a way that wipes out any possibility of humor. It uses violence to compensate for its lack of cleverness and makes feints in the direction of cleverness to deflect responsibility for its grotesquery and violence.
This makes “Boy Kills World” a failure in every possible way — as a comedy, as a drama, as an action movie, as a coherent piece of storytelling, and as a spectacle. It’s two hours of witless ugliness.
“Boy Kills World” takes place in an awful future world that’s dominated by a single family of ruthless incompetents, headed by a woman named Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), who has pretty much gone insane. The Van Der Koys rule their domain employing some of the tactics of the Roman Empire, a mix of aggressive oppression and games designed to distract the masses. The highlight of the year is an event known as “the Culling,” in which people opposed to the government are butchered on live television.
Bill Skarsgård, who played the killer clown in Andrés Muschietti’s remake of “It” and hereafter may be known as the Scary Skarsgård, plays Boy, who was permanently traumatized in childhood when he watched Hilda murder his entire family. Boy is also deaf and can’t speak, though he manages to narrate the movie from inside his own head, with the Scary Skarsgård adopting the voice of a video game announcer.
Following the murder of his family, Boy escapes into the countryside, where he is trained in the martial arts by his mentor (Yayan Ruhian). Here he is taught to become a killing machine, under the instruction of a teacher whose mission in life is to bring down the Van Der Koy regime.
The story of “Boy Kills World” is excessively convoluted, with the movie seeming to end after about 80 minutes. But, no, it goes on for another half hour, with more plot contortions. With each twist and turn of the story, “Boy Kills World” becomes less involving, though it’s never involving to begin with. Basically, the movie starts at zero and works its way into negative numbers.
At one point, someone drops a heavy piece of building material and accidentally smashes a guy’s head. That’s a punchline — a caved-in face and lots of splattered brains and blood. If that sounds hilarious, run to the theater before this film disappears by next week.
There’s no apparent human feeling on display here, just scene after scene of protracted martial arts combat that goes on and on, while providing no rooting interest. In several scenes, in between the carnage, the movie tries to persuade us to feel for Boy and his family. But that’s not happening. It’s not even possible.