Boy Kills World - Movie Review

The Movie: Boy Kills World

The Director: Moritz Mohr

The Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman, Isaiah Mustafa, Yayan Ruhian, Andrew Koji, Sharlto Copley, Famke Janssen

The Story: A fever dream action film that follows Boy, a deaf person with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he is trained by a mysterious shaman to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death.

The Rating: 5.5 / 10

The Review:

Imagine if a 12 year old fan of Takashi Miike movies and graphic novels sat down to watch The Hunger Games, Dredd, Kill Bill, and The Raid: Redemption and then met up with Sam Raimi to make a movie, this would most likely be the result. While all of that should be a good thing, in this case it really wasn't and that's unfortunate because this movie could have been so much more than it ended up being.

There are several things about this movie that are just annoying and too over the top for its own good which neartly led me to turn it off during the first act and that's something I rarely ever do. Fortunately, I chose to stick with it and there are some solid payoffs that made it worthwhile, mostly the fight scenes. I understand how the goofiness of the story is kind of essential and I don't think the movie would have been any better if it had been played more as a straight action movie so I'm not sure if there could have been a better way to tell this particular story.

If you are going to make a martial arts movie of any type, adding Yayan Ruhian to the cast is never going to be a bad thing. His work in this movie is nearly equal to what he does in The Raid and he pretty much saved the movie for me once his character really started to get involved. As The Shaman, he's sort of like Pai Mei in the Kill Bill movies, the master who trained Uma Thurman's character, and a total bad ass so yeah. He's really the best thing about this movie.

If you like the adolescent humor of Deadpool, the blood splattering fight scenes of Tarantino movies, and cinema that looks and feels like a video game then you might enjoy Boy Kills World. It's kind of all of those things, just not done nearly as well so be warned. Know what you're getting into.