Movie Review: 'Boy Kills World' Starring Bill Skarsgard

Boy Kills World (2024)

Directed by Moritz Mohr

Written by Tyler Burton Smith, Arend Remmers

Starring Bill Skarsgard, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Famke Janssen, Sharlto Copley

Release Date April 26th, 2024

Published April 29th, 2024

We are at a tipping point when it comes to ultraviolent revenge thrillers. The John Wick movies created a brief and shiny new genre in movies so violent they border on parody. Films with more bullets than words of dialogue became a fashion after Keanu Reeves killed the people who killed his dog. Naturally, the results have been a copy of a copy ever since. And the diminishing returns are only now becoming clear. Boy Kills World is one of the movies demonstrating that we may have fully tired of the blood and bullets invincible hero genre.

Boy Kills World stars Bill Skarsgard as the titular Boy. Rescued as a pre-teen from a fascist group of criminals who were in the process of hanging his family, the Boy is raised in the forest by a crazed Shaman (Yayan Ruhian). The Shaman teaches Boy to become a warrior and trains him specifically to kill the Vander Koye Family, the leaders of the fascist government and the people directly responsible for killing Boy's family. Boy especially wants revenge for the killing of his beloved little sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), who often appears to Boy as an apparition from his own imagination and subconscious.

After years of training, Boy finally decides to set his revenge in motion. Witnessing a massacre overseen by members of the Vander Koye Family, Glen (Sharlto Copley) and Gideon (Brett Gelman), who bicker like children before directing their top henchwoman, June 27 (Jessica Rothe), to execute anyone resisting them. The Vander Koye's were in the midst of selecting poor people to be executed on live television as part of 'The Culling,' an annual event overseen by the Vander Koye leader, Hilda Vander Koye (Famke Jannssen). Boy especially wants to kill Hilda as she directly oversaw the killing of his family.

As a child, Boy was left deaf and had his tongue cut out before he was rescued. Thus he is deaf and mute and unable to communicate with people. This leads to some comic misunderstandings in the midst of Boy murdering an endless number of faceless henchmen. The humor is desperately needed to take the edge off of this movie which is relentlessly violent. I have no problem with relentless violence, I am a fan of John Wick and I recently enjoyed Dev Patel's similarly relentless Monkey Man. That said, John Wick and Monkey Man were a little more coherent and better shot than Boy Kills World.

And, somehow, those movies are also less dystopian than Boy Kills World which ends on a bum note. The film builds to a convoluted and yet still predictable conclusion before proceeding to a second ending that saps what little goodwill I had left for the movie. The final moments of Boy Kills World are perhaps hopeful, but what came before it leaves that outcome a little too vague and deeply unsatisfying. The action is still good, the violence is well executed but the filmmakers simply didn't know when to leave well enough alone. Imagine if Monty Python kept introducing new versions of the Black Knight with the same joke over over and over again and you can guess what is going wrong in the final act of Boy Kills World.

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