Boy Kills World is a litmus test for fans of video game-inspired films

The most crucial thing you need to know if you go to the action thriller Boy kills the world is that it ultimately features a phenomenally bloody fight scene – a brutal, drawn-out crash in which faces are smashed, fingers dig purposefully into open wounds and fighters slowly drag a sharp object through each other’s bodies, tearing through skin and muscle with a palpable squelch . It’s a fight so grueling and brutal that even seasoned action movie veterans might grit their teeth and mutter in reflexive empathy.

But while squeamish viewers will want to know how messy the movie gets so they can avoid it, everyone else will want to know what to expect, because Boy kills the world it also seems so weightless, wacky and far from reality that it lacks any form of serious combat deployment. The sneering way director Moritz Mohr frames fights around video game references – complete with voiceover saying things like “Fatality!” and “Player two wins!” – doesn’t exactly prepare viewers for a confrontation in which the combatants’ pain meaningfully matters and the characters actually seem to get hurt.

But that last fight gives Boy kills the world more weight than the rest of the running time, and opens it up to action and martial arts fans who might otherwise be put off by the film’s strident, referential humor. The film is largely made exclusively for a specific brand of video game movie fans: it’s a checklist of retro beat-’em-up references and meta-comedies that some audiences will inevitably find broad, outrageous and off-putting, and some will find it playful and find energetic.

This isn’t quite Edgar Wright Scott pilgrim against the world, with the pop-up “Pow!” and “Kerblam!” animated effects for big hits, or the antagonists exploding into coin-operated victory rewards at the end of each battle. But it’s just as silly and shallow, with world-building that’s little more than an apathetic shrug, and a plot that’s largely an excuse for creatively staged battles that range from cheesy humor to surreal mind-game to that final, surprisingly serious battle.

Bill Skarsgård stars as the otherwise nameless Boy, a tragic victim, comically hapless doofus and world-class fighter whose skills were honed through years of jungle training with The Shaman (the badass martial arts film Yayan Ruhian, from The raid: redemption And The raid 2). Boy is not very bright and painfully naive, and he goes all in for the mission the shaman has given him: take down Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the totalitarian figurehead who rules their country.

Of course, she has a small army of well-armed mooks and a monstrous family that Boy must fight his way through as he climbs the ladder to avenge the family she took from him – including his little sister Mina (Quinn Copeland), whose death he still remembers vividly, but who hangs around him like a happy hallucination and sees his grim battle for revenge as a fun adventure where she gets to dress up as a ninja butterfly.

Boy had his tongue removed and his eardrums blown out when he was a child, part of the legacy of brutality in his vaguely defined, cliché-riddled fascist state. His deafness is played for awkward laughs—all the audible dialogue in the film is stylized like what he gets from lip reading, so when he meets someone he can’t interpret clearly, it seems like they’re spouting gibberish that Boy then interprets literally and vividly. visualizes. And his muteness is even more played for comedy, thanks to a wall-to-wall voiceover from H. Jon Benjamin, doing his best Mortal Kombat–announcer bass rumbles as he tells Boy’s thoughts.

That voiceover is from Boy’s favorite video game from his youth, Super Dragon Punch Force 3, a fictional game getting its own release as a tie-in project. And it’s a make-or-break element for Boy kills the world. Anyone who doesn’t find Benjamin’s nonstop stream-of-consciousness chatter hilarious will probably find this film unbearably annoying. Mina’s cheerful commentary on Boy’s violent misadventures in the murder is just as intrusive: he knows she’s not really there, but still can’t stop himself from arguing with her or fighting to save her from danger, which throws an extra layer of slapstick on his face. on top of the already absurd action.

Image: Roadside Attractions/Everett Collection

Boy kills the world feels like a litmus test for self-proclaimed video game movie fans. It’s a worksheet-style experience where anyone can add up the elements this film does and doesn’t share with other films in the subgenre and calculate what really makes a video game movie land. as a video game movie for them. Boy kills the world does not have the specific, recognizable characters; nostalgia factor; or cultural cachet of a Sonic, Super Mario Bros. or Minecraft movie. It has the tongue-in-cheek attitude that beat-’em-ups aren’t too serious fun, and that everyone recognizes the tropes and references that come with them. It’s not immersive or experiential, but it does follow the escalating combat dynamics from flunky to mini-boss to boss that are familiar from so many games.

A character who takes extreme damage, eats something, and shrugs off that damage? Yes. Cutscenes that continue the story while the main character watches and can’t interact with anything? Yes. Ridiculously colorful opponents, including a woman (Jessica Rothe) whose LED-enhanced motorcycle helmet visor signals insults and orders in battle? Bill. Improbable weapons, from improvised stabbing tools (in one case a carrot) to a combination of brass knuckles and a pistol? Yes. A power fantasy where one person can fight his way through an entire oppressive government, one fight at a time, through sheer skill? Certainly. A story built around extensive battle sequences? Certainly. All Boy kills the world What’s missing are upgrades, loot drops, inventory exchange, and gathering crafting mechanics. (Don’t laugh; some video game-inspired movies rely heavily on those kinds of mechanics.)

Image: Roadside Attractions/Everett Collection

It’s not like any of these things specifically define a video game movie, or even, more specifically, a satirical action movie that’s expressly made to feel like an installment in a specific subgenre of a video game. It’s more that the game of recognize-the-trope or get-the-joke is the entirety of Boy kills the world. Mohr knows exactly which audience he is targeting, and it is a fairly specific, limited audience. It’s not enough to know the kind of games he makes fun of, have a strong affection for them, and a penchant for graphic carnage without having to play them seriously.

It’s also not enough to find Benjamin endlessly hilarious, although that certainly helps. Boy kills the world requires viewers to insert a specific needle of concern for Boy and a few other side characters, enough to care about their goals and feelings, but not worry so much about poking the many holes in this world, or a questionable looking down the road The film revolves around just a few white characters, on both sides of the divide between good and evil, making their way through a field of people of color. It’s a strangely specific film, a joke aimed at fans of cheerful, cultish, trashy nonsense Guns Akimbo or Crank — that is, until that final battle suddenly starts taking the story seriously. But even then, it’s best to watch Boy kills the world with the same snarling detachment that the rest of the running time encourages.

Boy kills the world debuts in theaters on April 26.