BOY KILLS WORLD gets a little too silly, but always kicks ass.

 

Boy Kills World

Directed by Moritz Mohr

Written by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers

Starring Bill Skarsgåd, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Famke Janssen

Rated R

Runtime: 111 minutes

In theaters April 26

We used to get a lot of these movies: low- and mid-budget sci-fi movies from distributors like Cannon, Empire, and Full Moon, things you heard about at the video store or from friends who couldn't believe how old theirs was. a sibling recently looked but never saw signs of a bigger one from the world. Now there are fewer of them, but Sam Raimi, who always has an eye for talent, brought the fresh, wonderful release Boy Kills World to a wide audience..

This film started as a short film by the film's director Moritz Mohr and screenwriter Armend Remmers, and it has the working energy of a couple of people who are excited to see what they can achieve. Maybe if the short hadn't gone anywhere, if it hadn't caught Raimi's attention, Moritz and Remmers would have come back with something a little softer than the stuff we got, which is tonally somewhere between Cobra and Demolition Man. When I say it's not as good as either of those, I hope you take that with the understanding that I love those movies and don't offend Boy Kills World by associating them with them. I'm not coming to bury Demolition's baby, I'm going to praise it.

Like that movie, Boy Kills World has a plot, but it's just a plot on which to hang more exciting things. The two main characters don't even have real names. A boy named Boy (Bill Skarsgård) lost his family in the annual televised murder game show The Culling, where he grew up in a post-apocalyptic hell. Since then he has been trained by a shaman. (Yayan Ruhian, whose Casting is the clearest nod to the Raid series in that film). You know how it goes: bamboo is punched until they bleed, and food is distributed so conservatively that it's a surprise to everyone involved that the trainee isn't simply starving..

The boy bases his new human weapon persona on a video game like Street Figure II, and since he is deaf and dumb and never developed a voice, he chooses the game's announcer as his internal monologue. Skarsgård does the physical acting, but H. Jon Benjamin's voice says it all.

Rijwan

And Skarsgård appears. He moves like a character in a video game, going from stoic to tornado as fast as a Mortal Kombat combo. He was great in many films, both heavily subsuming the stories above it (as he did in Barbaro and The Devil All The Time) and the mania of everyone else (as he did in the It movies). You hear he's playing the Count in the upcoming Nosferatu movie, and you realize that makes perfect sense, which you can't say about any other actor of his generation

..When you hear the word "worldbuilding" it usually means "too much story at the expense of real characters and plot", the kind of writing that lends itself to huge wikis and not much else. I'm not saying Boy Kills World has great characters and plot, but it engages in my favorite part of world building, which is throwing a bunch of details at the screen and rationalizing them however you want. No one explains how the film industry works, no one tells the story of government. Things just happen.

There was some Capital incident in this world and the movie is set in a post-apocalypse, but it's a total bag from there. Some people are dressed in normal clothes, some have a Mad Max costume, some look like Power Rangers, some just stepped out of a Hong Kong action movie. It is as if the wild bands of The Warriors are made up of all of civilization, not its outcasts. The film continues in the same tone, jumping from training montages to fake cereal commercials and parkour runs to drug trips. When the story slows down (ie the plot twist comes out, which would be important if you were emotionally invested in the film's plot (I wasn't)), you can just look at all the art direction and smile.

.When you hear the word "worldbuilding" it usually means "too much story at the expense of real characters and plot", the kind of writing that lends itself to huge wikis and not much else. I'm not saying Boy Kills World has great characters and plot, but it engages in my favorite part of world building, which is throwing a bunch of details at the screen and rationalizing them however you want. No one explains how the film industry works, no one tells the story of government. Things just happen.

There was some Capital incident in this world and the movie is set in a post-apocalypse, but it's a total bag from there. Some people are dressed in normal clothes, some have a Mad Max costume, some look like Power Rangers, some just stepped out of a Hong Kong action movie. It is as if the wild bands of The Warriors are made up of all of civilization, not its outcasts. The film continues in the same tone, jumping from training montages to fake cereal commercials and parkour runs to drug trips. When the story slows down (ie the plot twist comes out, which would be important if you were emotionally invested in the film's plot (I wasn't)), you can just look at all the art direction and smile.

.Here's another thing that sets Boy Kills World apart from sci-fi movies: it looks good. The effects aren't cheap, and the film doesn't rely too much on them anyway. The fights could be staged more consistently, but when the big action nerves break, they look great. I like my fights to be clean without too much CGI coloration, but throwing in a little Michael Bay mess here and there works just fine.

The directors didn't make a Crank movie, but no one has in over a decade. The best way to watch Boy Kills World is high or as standalone fight scenes ripped from YouTube. But it's damn fun. Action eyelash. The biggest problem with Boy Kills World is that we no longer live in a world where studios release half a dozen similar movies every month..