'Boy Kills World' review: Ultraviolent action film hits you over the head with gimmicks

Roadside Attractions

We have a bona fide contender for Most Violent Film of the Year in the admirably bonkers but ultimately tedious “Boy Kills World,” with Bill Skarsgård (aka Pennywise from the “It” movies) looking as if he’s borrowed his brother Alexander’s training regimen to transform himself into a sleek and muscled mayhem machine who can take you out with his fists, his feet, any number of weapons and even a common kitchen utensil.

There’s no denying the “John Wick”-type artistry involved in some of the action sequences, but the screenplay invokes far too many gimmicks and eventually takes some wild Act III turns that feel manipulative and borderline ridiculous.

Directed by Mortiz Mohr (making his feature debut), filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, and filled with admittedly impressive production design and cinematography, “Boy Kills World” has a style and framework that will remind you of films such as “The Hunger Games," “The Purge” and the aforementioned “John Wick” franchise (you might recall Skarsgård as the villainous Marquis Vincent Bisset de Gramont in “John Wick: Chapter 4”) as well as a myriad of influential video games, including “Mortal Kombat.” Skarsgård plays a character known only as Boy, who is deaf and mute and often has trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, due to the horrific trauma he experienced when his mother and sister were murdered during the annual televised spectacle known as The Culling, in which the dictatorial and tyrannical Van Der Koy family has troops round up alleged dissidents for public executions.

For years, Boy has lived in the forest, where he has been trained by Shaman (the great Indonesian martial artist Yayan Ruhian), whose methods are so harsh he makes Pai Mei from “Kill Bill Vol. 2” look like a cuddly life coach in comparison.

Couple of things here about our man Boy:

• Because he cannot speak, he narrates the story through an inner voice which sounds like a stereotypical growling anti-hero (or just Will Arnett), because Boy figures that will make him sound cool. Thing is, though, the voice is provided not by Skarsgård but by H. Jon Benjamin from “Archer” and “Bob’s Burgers,” which keeps taking us out of the movie while creating a weird disconnect between the live, action-figure dude we see onscreen, and the funny guy narrating his story.
• If that wasn’t gimmick enough, Boy is often accompanied by the ghost, or perhaps it’s a hallucination, of his dead young sister Mina, who as played by Quinn Copeland is a plucky little cheerleader urging her big brother on.

What with Boy being deaf and mute, experiencing trippy visions, having an inner dialogue voice that sounds like a well-known voice-over animation actor AND the conversing with his dead little sister, it feels like overkill in a movie that’s mostly about getting from one big and bloody fight scene to the next.

Another major drawback: We have a quartet of greatly talented actors playing various members of the Van Der Koy family, yet their characters are more comical and/or inept than terrifying. Matriarch Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) is a fragile recluse, while her son-in-law Glen (Sharlto Copley) is a slick and creepy game show-host type who is the face of the family, and her son, the sadistic Gideon (Brett Gelman), is a wannabe writer who scripts the family’s televised appearances. Only Michelle Dockery’s Melanie, a PR specialist and puppet master who is Hilda’s daughter and is married to Glen, has a formidable ice-cool presence.

Even surrounded by an endless parade of anonymous hench-people, the Van Der Koys don’t seem like much of a match for the killing machine Boy has become. (Their primary hope of stopping Boy is Jessica Rothe’s lethal fighting expert June27 — that’s her name, June27 — who expresses herself through LED messages on her helmet.)

More interesting are Boy’s newfound accomplices in his mission to take down the Van Der Koys: the resourceful rebel Basho (Andrew Koji), who was a longtime prisoner of the family until Boy freed him, and Basho’s associate Benny (Isaiah Mustafa, who was in “It Chapter Two” and has a solid resume, but is perhaps best known as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” from the Old Spice commercials), who is prone to mumbling, making it impossible for Boy to read his lips, which is actually pretty funny as we hear that inner voice try to discern what the heck Benny is saying.

The action in “Boy Kills World” is ferocious and creatively rendered, but the piling on of the gimmicks, as well as those late-story revelations, only enhance the feeling we’ve been yanked around for much of a 111-minute film that plays much longer.