Boy (Bill Skarsgård, voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) has been training in a remote camp under his Shaman (Yayan Ruhian) for most of his entire life.  The two went into hiding after the annual culling, a public execution of those who have crossed Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) to remind the rest of the townspeople that they are to comply with her will.  Having narrowly escaped his own execution, Boy has committed his life to avenging the murder of his sister Mina (Quinn Copeland) whose ghost still haunts his imagination. 

Moritz Mohr directs Boy Kills World from a story he broke with Arend Remmers who co-wrote the script with Tyler Burton Smith.  It premiered at the 2023 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, but Lionsgate held its release until spring of 2024.  The bloody punch ‘em and shoot ‘em up action film sits just on the edge of action comedy, but at 111 minutes, the simple conceit wears thin, and the film begins to fold back over on itself, strangling out the more lighthearted elements.  From the premise alone, the film immediately calls forth memories of The Hunger Games and John Wick, but those two franchises really cloud what Mohr is trying to do here; unfortunately, though, Mohr is not doing much to keep his audience engaged in what is happing in this film so it is not surprising that minds will begin to wander to these other more effective titles. 

Skarsgård centers the film, though in flashbacks both Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti fill in as the younger version of the vigilante, and he does a really good job at leaning into and playing up the concept.  Turned both deaf and mute from his narrow escape from his own culling, the role is physical beyond just being a series of combative set pieces, but he has to pantomime along with Benjamin’s inner monologue as well.  Mohr is not particularly concerned about subtlety, so he really lets the actor play up the facial expressions and contort his body to follow the emotional ebbs and flows of the narrative, but it plays out more like the premise of an actor’s workshop instead of a performance that is supposed to anchor a film. 

The world of the film is a combination of many unique elements as if a playbox got spilled over so there is some dystopian sci-fi, mixed with physical combat that is pulling from Asian inspiration à la the Kill Bill duology, and then peppered with various eccentric and boldly stylized characters; the entire Van Der Koy family and the Pirate themed cereal mascots to name just a few.  Production designer Mike Berg really lets his departments have fun with the various settings and locations, and in that sense, Boy Kills World feels like a very rich film.  Danielle Knox dressed the cast in a wide wardrobe of costumes that can best be described as the full range available when selecting a video game character’s armor.  This is an appropriate breadth that makes sense in context given the film’s allegiance to the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat style arcade scrollers.  Set decorator Fred Du Preez also gets to play, especially in a major set piece at around the halfway mark of the film that takes place at the TV Studio where the culling is being filmed and broadcast live.  The snowy set soon becomes a PR nightmare for Frosty Puffs, the cereal brand that has sponsored this year’s controlled killing, and it sets the high point for the film because Mohr is actually having fun along with the cast. 

Having that high point at the middle of the film is a great way to inject some excitement into a sagging narrative, but it has the undesired effect of making everything that comes after it pale in comparison.  Though the action across the runtime is varied between guns, fists, and whatever else can be scrounged up from the environment, it is filmed in such a dizzying way that it leaves little impact on the audience.  Part of the problem is the stylistic choice to speed up the action, especially when Boy is running and jumping.  Like the costuming, it is used to emulate the experience of watching a video game where the characters are moving just outside the realm of naturalism, but without a controller in our hands, it just feels silly to watch. 

Boy Kills World comes at a really unfortunate period in action filmmaking where anything that is stylized gets immediately compared to John Wick, and the concept of a silent character has also begun to be heavily leaned on again as these lone wolf heroes usurp the saddle of the silent, stoic Western stars of yesteryear. It is frustrating that the market has become so saturated because if any film makes sense to have both of those elements, it is Boy Kills World but it feels derivative given the current landscape. Skarsgård does what he can with the role, but struggles under the weight of forming a character out of nothing.  All of the personality and wit is given to Benjamin so Skarsgård is stuck being a vehicle for punches and nothing more.  Audiences then are also denied the chance to really revel in the young actor’s proven acuity in these menacing roles, and the immediately identifiable timbre of Benjamin’s voice brings up memories of his work in the more appropriate Archer or the currently running Bob’s Burgers.  The film is more tonally familiar with the former, but the film is painted with too broad strokes to really be as effective as it wants to be.  As a feature debut for Mohr, it is still an impressively cohesive work, especially in how it blends all of these styles and genre elements.  He does not drill too deeply into how the world ended up in the dystopia, but he wisely knows he does not need to as there is enough going on that we understand what we need, so he can quickly move on to the next sequence. A little more focus would have gone a long way, here, but Boy Kills World is a bold and brash heralding of a new talent in action filmmaking.