#Review #Boy #kills #world #infantile #max
Action
Rating: 0. Rating scale: 0 to 5.
”Boy kills world”
Regi: Moritz Mohr
Manus: Tyler Burton Smith, Arend Remmers, Moritz Mohr.
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Michelle Dockery, Famke Janssen, and more.
Length: 1 hr 51 min (15 years). Language: English. Bio premiere.
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Why has it become such a trend to let Hollywood Swedes play dumb action heroes? Does Swedish really sound that bad? A few years ago, Alexander Skarsgård kept his mouth shut in Duncan Jones’ tech-noir “Mute” (2018), last winter Joel Kinnaman had his vocal cords removed in John Woo’s “Silent night” (2023) and now it is Bill Skarsgård who has lost both his tongue and hearing in “Boy kills world”.
Unlike the previous two films, the main character here, simply called Boy, has an inner voice. The trailer-cheeky male voice that articulates his thoughts is taken from an arcade game he remembers from his childhood. The source is no accident: this is action in the style of classic side-scrolling button-pressing parties. But despite the narration, “Boy kills world” has minimal to say.
Not for message delivery is said to have been what drove Moritz Mohr to make the pilot short with which he joined producers Sam Raimi and Roy Lee on this full-length version. You can generously read social criticism into the dystopian depiction of an upper-class family that rules with an iron fist, silences critical voices with firearms and shows off its authoritarian power in lavish television productions.
The protagonist has a single goal: kill Hilda van der Koy (Famke Janssen), the tyrannical matriarch who ordered his family’s execution. As the family’s only survivor, he has been taught since childhood by a mysterious shaman in the jungle, dutifully depicted in a classic training montage. Shortly thereafter, the killing machine is unleashed in an almost uninterrupted action sequence (choreographed by “action designer” Dawid Szatarski).
The sights are set on pure action of the kind that in the nineties was a dear import from Hong Kong, but which the success of the John Wick films also made interesting in an English-language studio context. Other influences can be sensed in the casting: next to the young and handsome, as well as the slightly older and plastic-operated, ruffly Yayan Ruhian is noticeable as the combat-capable shaman. Action fans recognize the Indonesian martial artist as one of the crazies in Gareth Evans’ high-intensity “The Raid” films.
If the role models are characterized of gut-wrenching rawness, night-kissed aesthetics and creative choreography, “Boy kills world” is just messy, screaming, stupid and downright infantile in its desperation to wreak havoc with a twinkle in the eye. When sentimentality is later squeezed in, as if there were suddenly a heart somewhere inside the film’s soulless arcade cabinet, I just want to hump the white screen with the closest affection. Let’s call it self-defense.
See more. Three other examples of brain dead action: ”Crank” (2006), ”Hardcore Henry” (2015), ”The night comes for us” (2018).
Read others film and television reviews in DN and more texts by Sebastian Lindvall.
