Boy Kills World
In a pivotal scene from “Boy Kills World,” a hyper action movie about a media-addicted killer who wants to avenge his family’s deaths, several enemies of the state are murdered on live TV. We don’t know what people think of these deaths or who the TV casualties are, but we do know that they were killed by Frosty Puffs cereal mascots. This is supposed to be a spoiler, but it’s not.
Frosty Puffs sponsors The Culling, an annually televised flex of power organized by insecure fascist Melanie Van Der Koy (Michelle Dockery) and her family. Frosty Puffs also figures prominently into the overblown and underdeveloped backstory of the titular Boy (Bill Skarsgård), a deaf mute orphan who fondly remembers eating sugary breakfast cereal when he was little before the Van Der Koys murdered his family.
“Boy Kills World” is a generic programmer about one more lonely mixed media junkie who wants to murder the demagogues that he blames for ruining his life. Skarsgård’s character eventually feels conflicted about his murder quest, as he tells us through overbearingly goofy voiceover narration (H. John Benjamin). But he doesn’t seem to care that his beloved Frosty Puffs have partnered with the Van Der Koys in fact, Boy himself later enjoys a bowl of Frosty Puffs. Something doesn’t add up here.
The film gestures at media criticism by fixating on how the Van Der Koy family manipulates said media, though this only means so much in a gory and joyless action comedy that imagines media consumers and political dissidents as unmemorable extras. We know what Skarsgård’s avenging hero wants because his stream-of-conscious narration never stops telling us everything he’s thinking or feeling.
We can also tell some things about the righteous nature of the Boy’s mission based on a series of generic training montage sequences starring “The Raid” star Yayan Ruhian as an eccentric bog hermit who knows how to fight and takes hallucinogens. The Boy is also haunted by visions of his dead sister (Quinn Copeland), and she talks, too.
The Van Der Koys are also fairly obvious. Melanie is vain and thinks televised executions are good for her TV ratings, Glen (Sharlto Copley) is a temperamental buffoon who supposedly is (or was?) popular with his wife’s supporters, Gideon (Brett Gelman) is a frustrated artist, pouring his heart into pompous speeches and scripts for his uncaring family’s public demonstrations. In another key scene, Melanie literally projects her insecurities onto the Boy because he can’t communicate verbally. Which is weird, because he still speaks a language that she’s fluent in over the top violence.
During manic action scenes, the cameras swoop over, under and through teeming crowds of heavily armed and often faceless heavies. Limbs break, bodies tumble through the air, chunks of flesh frequently explode in gouts of blood. There isn’t much difference between the dizzying sensational presentation of violence in any of the Boy’s fight scenes and our abovementioned Frosty Puffs massacre.
Actually, “Boy Kills World” includes all violence with video games though the street fighting game Skarsgård’s character tells us he based his voiceover narration voice on. The director of this action scenes seems to have watched Kingsman spy movie parodies and “Argylle,” which opens in similar antic slow fast slow beats. In these braindead media critiques, so much pseudo comic stress is put on sweeping camera movements and impact driven maneuvering that it reduces everything funny, upsetting, and spectacular about these scenes to its sheer numbing impact. You don’t get to enjoy any of the on-screen action’s flow or development because the filmmakers constantly insert themselves between you and whatever cheap thrills you might’ve hoped to enjoy.
This creative fussiness is also a sign of bad faith on the part of the filmmakers behind “Boy Kills World,” who are as fussy about their delicate feelings as they are about being seen as sensitive artists. At one point in “Boy Kills World,” Gideon angrily tells Dennis (Pierre Nelson), an actor who’s stuck rehearsing one of Gideon’s scripted Van Der Koy spectacles, “Feel a ****ing feeling, Dennis.” That meta criticism means something: maybe it suggests a fight scene’s aggressive stylization, or perhaps it speaks to the connection between the Van Der Koys and their breakfast cereal sponsors? Well yes but no.
You can’t watch “Boy Kills World” passively did Benjamin’s character have to talk so much? nor should you interpret anything meaningful from third act plot twists that disrupt Boy’s plans for revenge. But here again we find another instance where Copley plays creepy well while Skarsgård pantomimes his butt off, Ruhian looks more convincing than anyone else tasked with executing complicated stunt work; and some actors deliver fully developed performances because they weren’t encouraged otherwise by their directors, producers, or fellow cast members.
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