Boy Kills World: Bill Skarsgard stars in blood-soaked thriller

2/5 stars

Exploding onto the screen like the bastard son of a dozen 1980s action movies and an arcade full of beat-’em-up video games, Boy Kills World is a whirl of blood-soaked martial arts and jet black humour that barely pauses for breath.

Over the course of two hours, Boy tears through the hierarchy of a near-future dystopia in the hopes of destroying the regal Van Der Koys, responsible for murdering his family.

The hook to Boy Kills World is that, because of his debilitated senses, Boy narrates his every waking moment through an incessant internal monologue, in a voice lifted from his favourite childhood video game, Super Dragon Punch Force 3.

Comedian and voice artist H. Jon Benjamin (Archer, Bob’s Burgers) provides Boy with the vocal identity for his relentlessly self-aware, comic-book-style voice-over.

Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) rules with an iron fist, staging an annual “culling”, whereby a dozen enemies of the state are ceremonially executed in front of the people.

Such a fate befell Boy’s own mother and sister, and he has spent the years since living in hiding, honing his body into a lethal weapon under the brutal tutelage of Yayan Ruhian’s unforgiving Shaman.

Once Boy is set in motion, there is no stopping the swathe of bloody carnage he unleashes.

First-time writer-director Moritz Mohr shot the film in South Africa, which lends it a visually distinctive otherworldliness, but beyond this cosmetic exoticism, Boy Kills World ploughs a painfully familiar path.

Its sustained tone of fast-paced choreography, splashy violence and knowingly irreverent humour soon becomes exasperating, leaving it with no other option than to barrel towards a wholly predictable finale.

Skarsgard’s performance must be commended for its physicality, but ultimately Boy Kills World becomes as much of a physical ordeal to watch as for its hero to survive, and will surely prompt all but the most resilient of viewers to tap out long before justice is served.