If you’re 15 years old, Boy Kills World might be your favorite movie ever. The nonstop gruesome action, cheeky comedy and vengeance-driven narrative check all the boxes for the type of kickass movie young teens crave. But for adults, the film feels like something we’ve long outgrown. Despite its R rating, director Moritz Mohr’s film is keenly targeted to a teenage audience, slamming viewers with gratuitous violence, Gen-Z humor and YA themes in a way that will surely turn off more squeamish and more mature viewers.
Boy Kills World begins with a brief narration that sets the backdrop for the film’s universe: a generic fascist dystopia ruled by the Van Der Koy family. As with many stories like this—The Hunger Games, The Purge—society is underpinned by some central event. Here, it’s the annual Culling in which a selection of the weak and rebellious are publicly killed. Enter Boy (Bill Skarsgård), our titular deaf protagonist whose family was killed during one of the Cullings. Their deaths prompted him to escape to the woods to train with a shaman (Yayan Ruhian), a renegade warrior who teaches Boy the skills needed to take revenge on the Van Der Koys. Joined by a few new comrades and sporadic hallucinations of his beloved dead sister, Boy decides it’s finally time for retribution, and his story kicks off.
At its core, Boy Kills World is a traditional revenge flick where the action is the centerpiece, and if the plot sounds generic, that’s because it is. The action is cool, though it pales in comparison to something like John Wick, the new standard in revenge-fueled shoot-em-ups. John Wick doesn’t feature a revolutionary plotline, either. Instead, it uses creative, careful direction and action techniques to captivate audiences through its physicality. As Wick moves from enemy to enemy, each successive scene feels fresh. The setting, weapons and camera angles continuously change, keeping the audience on their toes. This is where Boy Kills World falters. Each action scene, save for the last, feels generic and repetitive. Unlike Chad Stahelski, Mohr fails to keep the audience on edge and instead features similar weapons and a tedium of identical bad guys with egregious storm-trooper aim. It’s still fun to watch Boy drop swarms of enemies, but the monotony of the film begins to become a bore.
Today’s franchise movies often deliver films where the stakes continue to rise with each successive sequel until each and every movie is about saving the world, but John Wick proves that bigger isn’t always better. One of the standouts of the Wick films is the pathos of the story. Wick begins his killing spree not for some outlandish or noble reason but because a thug killed his cute puppy. This ordinary yet emotional motivation tugs on the audience’s heartstrings, encouraging us to root for Wick as he mows through his enemies. In Boy Kills World, the grandiose sci-fi elements hurt the film. While we understand the setting and stakes, there isn’t the same suspension of disbelief or emotional intensity. Part of the reason for this is that Mohr fails to adequately introduce the universe and our villain, Hilda (Famke Janssen), preventing us from connecting with our protagonist and his motivations. The result is a less personal story that audiences won’t connect as well with.
Though the film is filled with gruesome violence and serious themes, Boy Kills World is still very much a comedy. Surely aiming to appeal to its young audience, the humor adds levity and fun to a movie otherwise filled with gruesome action and a serious setting. It’s ambitious in its humor, firing nearly as many jokes as Boy fires bullets. However, the hit rate is more similar to that of the goons than Boy himself. There are a few funny bits—particularly Boy being unable to understand one of his accomplices and filling in the gaps with gibberish—but the humor otherwise falls mostly flat.
Mohr’s directorial debut shows some promising elements, but ultimately Boy Kills World tries too hard to connect with a young demographic. Had Mohr trimmed down some of the violence and humor and dedicated time to worldbuilding, the film would have been more compelling. Instead, he gets a bit too cheeky and preoccupied with turning the film into a teenage gunfight. This is ironically well summed up by the title—a play on the ‘90s coming of age sitcom Boy Meets World that’s surely unrecognizable to most teens today. Like the film, the play on words is fun, but it tries a bit too hard for its own good.
Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions / Lionsgate
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