Boy Kills World (2023)

A film more obsessed with Skarsgård's 6-pack than being coherent or watchable. Total rubbish - Boy Kills World review by TB

A film I made the effort to go and see at the cinema and wished I hadn't bothered. Bill Skarsgård plays Boy, who when he was younger, witnessed his entire family be slaughtered at the hands of the Van Der Koys, a blood-thirsty & fascist family who every year target people from the population who have committed crimes against them or the state, then kill them. Boy is rescued by a shaman, who then spends many years teaching him the martial arts skills needed to kill the family and get his revenge.

This film grates in pretty much every way you can imagine. For example, every character, mainly the inner-voice of Boy, sounds exactly like all those films which came out when Tarantino first exploded onto the scene in the 90's: stilted, nonsensical & extremely annoying staccato dialogue, which frequently goes off on random, weird tangents. Tarantino was the only one who was really able to pull this off, but even he started to lose his touch later on in his career.

The characters themselves are also written terribly. Sharlto Copley plays the annoying husband of one of the family, who will read a speech from a piece of paper, then break away from it halfway through to have a meltdown at the other family member who wrote it. Halfway through a fight scene, we are introduced to Basho, who very quickly establishes himself as the irritating sidekick whose primary role is to either shout exposition or just shout & be generally annoying.

There is only one thing this film seems obsessed with and that is finding as many different angles/ways to show off Skarsgård's gym-toned body as possible. Whether in the training montage or at random points in the story, Skarsgård will suddenly be posed picture-perfectly, with biceps bulging out or his 6-pack filling the screen. Guys, I saw very clearly within the first 10 minutes that Skarsgård obviously moved into the gym for a year and did nothing but work out in preparation for this role. But it doesn't interest me in the slightest, just make a good movie.

The film just drags on, throwing onto the screen various fight scenes which, whilst they have some good choreography, is totally lost in the terrible editing & filming. Like Monkey Man before it, although much much worse, the director seems to think that frenetic camera movements where you can't actually see what's happening half the time is the best way to shoot a fight scene.

I lasted about an hour before walking out. The quality of action films & their production at the moment is terrible, and to compensate by filling the screen with obnoxious characters just makes things worse. A real letdown.