Boy Kills World Review: Bill Skarsgård’s Work with His Character is Convincing from Start to Finish
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Famke Janssen, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman
Director: Moritz Mohr
Streaming Platform: Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)
Boy Kills World was released exclusively on Prime Video on May 27th, a film directed by debutant Moritz Mohr and starring (silent) Bill Skarsgård, the Swedish actor known for playing Pennywise in the adaptation of It from a few years ago. If you are looking for a film to watch on Amazon’s streaming platform and have come across Boy Kills World, follow us in this review because it is better to come prepared to watch a film like this: let’s start with the spoiler-free plot summary. The first impression that Boy Kills Word gives us is that it was born from a set of good ideas already exploited better by others. We have a boy (the “Boy” of the title) looking for revenge, a dystopian dictatorial future, and an annual date in which the family in command carries out carnage to keep the population under control (a mix between The Hunger Games and The Night of Judgment). As we will see in this review of Boy Kills World, in Moritz Mohr’s film only the action component is well packaged, the plot and general tone of the film are decidedly incomplete and unbalanced.
If Bill Skarsgård is always charismatic – and is capable of truly breathtaking stunts – the film has little to stand on, and the spectator laboriously drags himself to the end between predictable twists and elements so caricatural and grotesque as to undermine his involvement in the story. Boasting a cast of recognizable faces and out-of-scale violence, Boy Kills World strikes first and foremost with its bloody and trashy verve that is always over the top. Bill Skarsgård, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, and Brett Gelman are just some of the names that attract fans to this project, promising a journey in which the furious and unruly strength of a single person wants to oppose the power of a neighboring world, in some things, to ours. A true silent one-man army traumatized and above all without any hesitation about killing.
Boy Kills World Review: The Story Plot
The film is set in a dystopian America under the dictatorship of the ruthless Van der Koy family, who in addition to ruling with an iron fist every year celebrate a rite called “The Call” for which 12 random people are chosen as sacrificial victims in honor of Hilda, the leader of the clan at the top of power (but our favorite is Gideon, played by Brett Gelman, aka Murray from Stranger Things). One year the Van der Koys also killed the mother and sister Mina of Boy, our protagonist, who was saved by an Asian martial arts master nicknamed The Shaman. Despite having been rendered deaf and mute, Boy undergoes the harsh training of the grim Miyagi on duty for years with only one objective: to avenge his mother and sister, who he continues to see as a kind of guardian angel, and kill Hilda and every one the Van der Koys.
The plot of Boy Kills World develops starting from a traumatic event experienced directly by the main protagonist who has no name (played by Bill Skarsgård). In showing us the unprecedented violence that forever marked his childhood, the film takes advantage of this to present us with the world in which we will see the same story unfold, thus outlining its salient features. In a city with fictitious cultural, architectural, and iconographic roots, the pressing dictatorship of a family, the Van Der Koys, holds power in its hands under a grip that has lasted for some time now. We don’t know the reasons that pushed them so high, but we can immediately see them at work during a particular and traditional ceremony in which they kill all their enemies (political and otherwise) before the eyes of the people who are both struck and speechless.
From such a dynamic we see the little protagonist who is separated from the people dear to him and mutilated, he is deaf and dumb when we get to know him. In the most total isolation of a jungle on the edge of civilized society, an unknown and mysterious man called by all the Shaman will decide to collect what remains of the child, shaping his life and intentions to make him a real death machine. The annoying thought of revenge and the very harsh training will lead the young man towards adulthood, fueling his hunger for blood, on a journey that makes violence the only true personal redemption, as well as contrast with a cruel, amoral place without any hesitation.
Boy Kills World Review and Analysis
Without mincing words, the main dynamics of Boy Kills World are practically identical to those of all the most classic revenge movies imaginable. There is a man, there is an unjust world and there is the indomitable conviction of being able to take justice into account alone and with one’s strength against something gigantic and super-armed. Nothing more and nothing less. The feature film directed by Moritz Mohr is a real “over-the-top toy” and it is precisely in the self-awareness of one’s own identity that we find the true voice behind the project. The film does not want to be more than it seems, and in this identity process, we identify some of its most interesting and original moments. The characterization of the protagonist, for example, and the fact that he narrates himself for the entire duration of the film, generating a real narrative and introspective filter through which we spectators also experience what happens around him, the encounters he has, and the sensations he experiences step by step.
Or the idea of blocking their mental growth at an infantile age which is continually proposed during the fighting phase with all the typical phrases of fighting video games, or the fact of continually dampening the tension with moments of openly parodistic and trashy nature. It is the formal ideas of Boy Kills World that attempt to detach it from similar products, to develop a completely personal voice, while following a rather classic and above all predictable main writing. At the heart of everything we find the brutal violence and the fight choreographies of the various fights, real dances captured by a direction that has no problem framing the most absurd and bloody moments. The camera, in Boy Kills World, is always in motion, always fleeting in presenting a context with features that are both standardized, in terms of general characterization, and cartoonish and curiously colorful. The villains, for example, are all easily recognizable in their being and pose to the protagonist, as well as the other background characters alongside him, outlining a series of turns that are extremely easy to predict if not exactly phone calls from the beginning.
So, you soon find yourself involved in a real “dance of death”, punctuated by a series of rounds and bosses introduced by the protagonist himself who experiences the events and violence. Boy Kills World, despite presenting some interesting ideas, unfortunately, does not leave its mark in what it does, proposing a rather familiar over-the-top context (impossible not to think, for example, of the Hunger Games saga for many things) without ever really delving into its details at the base. We know nothing of the world proposed by the feature film and this feeling of unresolved accompanies the vision until its final phases, in which it reveals its real and bestial nature made up of excesses, blood, and many, many blows.
Unfortunately, in the face of these interesting ideas, the writing of the film, too often, transforms the satirical elements into pure parody, remaining at a superficial level in the metafilm criticism of the entertainment industry. The entire philosophical/martial structure is reduced to Tarantinian stylistic features, which favor training montage sequences focused on the brutal Indonesian martial art silat – it is no coincidence that Shaman is played by Yayan Ruhian star of The Raid (Evans, 2011), a film which contributed significantly to the spread of this fighting style in the Hollywood mainstream. Boy Kills World, from a technical point of view, exaggerates today’s action video game trend, constructing entire sequences in which the camera follows the various forms of combat fluidly and in detail, moving as if it were the point of view of a hypothetical video gamer. The director alternates these moments with wide-angle, unreal subjective shots and an effervescent use of CGI, to create surreal moments, during the most violent sequences, putting into practice James Gunn’s lesson in The Suicide Squad (2021).
Ultimately we are faced with yet another nostalgic entertainment device that seeks to ride the last yearnings of a generation of forty-year-old spectators, in search of an impossible return to an idyllic childhood made up of consumer objects and cheap entertainment, while the fruits of the neoliberal economic policies underlying that imaginary, threaten to plunge us into new wars, capable of making the dystopian nightmares of that period real. Since it is not very clear from the plot summary, we underline it here: Boy Kills World is an extremely violent film, with dozens of characters who die or are seriously injured in the bloodiest ways possible: you are warned, if you don’t like films full of forget the beatings and blood. It is also true that, despite or rather even in the splatter scenes, the comic side of a film is never lost in which, since the protagonist is deaf and mute, he chooses to have as his narrative voice that, so solemnly exalted, of the fighting video game which he played with his little sister as a child.
Boy Kills World Review: The Last Words
Boy Kills World is a dystopian that is only interested in its action component: plot, worldbuilding, and characters are neglected and do not satisfy. The protagonist Bill Skarsgård is always charismatic and charming. The result is therefore a long series of violent scenes inserted into a plot with decidedly predictable twists, but if you are looking for a light film and the blood on the screen doesn’t impress you too much, Boy Kills World is the right choice. Developing from a series of sketchy and extremely classic narrative dynamics as a whole, Boy Kills World tries in every way to captivate through its bloody and choreographed violence. Bill Skarsgård plays the role of the silent and resolute protagonist, continually breaking his most classic seriousness through introspection that entertains without leaving much more. The intentions of the feature film are clearer than ever, and when self-awareness takes control of the situation, providing light and over-the-top moments, it works too. Such work, however, is not enough to sustain a rather predictable experience as a whole, even with some interesting ideas and moments.
Boy Kills World Review: Bill Skarsgård's Work with His Character is Convincing from Start to Finish - Filmyhype
Director: Moritz Mohr
Date Created: 2024-05-27 13:10
3
Pros
- Bill Skarsgård's work with his character is convincing from start to finish.
- Some choreography and splatter moments.
- Some "games" with the camera and ideas in scenography and cinematographic make-up.
Cons
- Boy Kills World is far too predictable in terms of story.
- Zero desire to delve deeper into the context in which everything moves and develops.
- Some narrative stereotypes in general.
