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

Probably the most essential factor to know going into the action-thriller Boy Kills World is that it will definitely options a phenomenally bloody combat scene — a brutal prolonged throwdown the place faces are smashed, fingers purposefully dig into open wounds, and combatants slowly drag a sharp object by one another’s our bodies, ripping by pores and skin and muscle with a tactile squelch. It’s a combat so grueling and brutal that even seasoned action-movie veterans may clench their enamel and mutter in reflexive empathy.

However whereas squeamish viewers will wish to know the way messy the film will get to allow them to steer clear, everybody else will wish to know what to anticipate as a result of Boy Kills World in any other case appears so weightless, goofy, and much from actuality that it lacks any type of severe fight stakes. The smirky approach director Moritz Mohr frames combats round video recreation references — full with voice-over narration saying issues like “Fatality!” and “Player two wins!” — doesn’t precisely put together viewers for a face-off the place the combatants’ ache meaningfully issues and the characters really appear to be getting harm.

However that last combat provides Boy Kills World extra weight than the remaining of its run time, and opens it as much as motion and martial arts fans who may in any other case be delay by the film’s strident, referential humor. The movie was largely constructed strictly for a particular model of video recreation film fans: It’s a guidelines of retro beat-’em-up references and meta comedy tropes that some audiences are inevitably going to search out broad, extreme, and off-putting, and a few are going to search out playful and energizing.

This isn’t fairly Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, with its pop-up “Pow!” and “Kerblam!” animated results for massive hits, or its antagonists exploding into coin-drop victory rewards on the finish of each combat. However it’s nearly as foolish and surfacey, with world-building that’s little greater than an apathetic shrug, and a plot that’s largely an excuse for creatively staged fights that vary from dopey humor to surreal thoughts recreation to that last, surprisingly severe battle.

Invoice Skarsgård stars because the in any other case unnamed Boy, a tragic sufferer, comically hapless doofus, and world-class combatant whose expertise have been honed by years of jungle coaching with The Shaman (martial arts film stalwart Yayan Ruhian, of The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2). Boy is none too brilliant and painfully naïve, and he’s all-in on the mission The Shaman has given him: to take down Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the totalitarian figurehead ruling their nation.

Naturally, she has a small military of well-armed mooks and a monstrous household Boy has to battle his approach by as he climbs the ladder to avenge the household she took from him — together with his little sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), whose dying he vividly remembers, however who hangs round him as a cheery hallucination who sees his grim battle for vengeance as a enjoyable journey the place she will get to decorate up like a ninja butterfly.

Boy had his tongue eliminated and his eardrums burned out when he was a baby, half of the legacy of brutality in his vaguely delineated, cliché-riddled fascist state. His deafness is performed for uncomfortable laughs — all of the audible dialogue all through the movie is stylized as what he will get from lip-reading, so when he meets somebody he can’t interpret clearly, they look like spouting gibberish that Boy then literalizes and vividly visualizes. And his muteness is performed much more for comedy, due to a wall-to-wall voice-over from H. Jon Benjamin, doing his greatest Mortal Kombat–announcer bass rumble as he narrates Boy’s ideas.

That voice-over is taken from Boy’s favourite childhood video recreation, Tremendous Dragon Punch Drive 3, a fictional recreation getting its personal launch as a tie-in venture. And it’s a make-or-break ingredient for Boy Kills World. Anybody who doesn’t see Benjamin’s nonstop stream-of-consciousness chatter as hilarious is prone to discover this film unbearably grating. Mina’s chirpy commentary on Boy’s violent misadventures in assassination is simply as intrusive: He is aware of she isn’t actually there, however nonetheless can’t cease himself from arguing along with her or preventing to avoid wasting her from hazard, which throws an additional layer of slapstick on prime of the already absurd motion.

Picture: Roadside Points of interest/Everett Assortment

Boy Kills World seems like a litmus test for self-identified fans of video recreation movies. It’s a worksheet-style expertise the place anybody can add up the weather this film does and doesn’t share with different movies in its subgenre, and do the maths about what makes a video recreation film actually land as a video recreation film for them. Boy Kills World doesn’t have the particular, recognizable characters; nostalgia issue; or cultural cachet of a Sonic, Tremendous Mario Bros., or Minecraft film. It does have the tongue-in-cheek angle that beat-’em-ups are not-too-serious enjoyable, and that everybody acknowledges the tropes and references that include them. It isn’t immersive or experiential, however it does comply with the escalating flunky-to-miniboss-to-boss-fight dynamics acquainted from so many video games.

A personality taking excessive harm, consuming one thing, and shaking that harm off? Yep. Cutscenes that progress the story whereas the protagonist stands by and may’t work together with something? Yep. Ridiculously colourful antagonists, together with a lady (Jessica Rothe) whose LED-enhanced motorcycle-helmet visor spells out insults and orders in fight? Verify. Unlikely weapons, from improvised stabbing instruments (in a single case a carrot) to a brass-knuckles-plus-gun combo? Ayep. An influence fantasy the place one individual can slice his approach by a complete oppressive authorities, one combat at a time, by sheer talent? Positive. A narrative constructed round elaborate fight sequences? Definitely. All Boy Kills World is lacking is upgrades, loot drops, inventory-swapping, and gathering mechanics for crafting. (Don’t chortle; some video game-inspired movies lean laborious into these sorts of mechanics.)

Picture: Roadside Points of interest/Everett Assortment

It isn’t that any of this stuff particularly defines a video recreation film, and even, extra particularly, a satirical motion film expressly made to really feel like an installment in a particular video recreation subgenre. It’s extra that the sport of recognize-the-trope or get-the-in-joke is everything of Boy Kills World. Mohr is aware of precisely the viewers he’s aiming for, and it’s a pretty particular, slender one. It isn’t sufficient to know the sort of video games he’s lampooning, have a robust affection for them, and have a style for graphic bloodshed while not having it to be performed critically.

It additionally isn’t sufficient to search out Benjamin endlessly hilarious, although that definitely helps. Boy Kills World requires viewers to string a particular needle of caring about Boy and a few different aspect characters sufficient to interact with their objectives and emotions, however not caring a lot that they poke on the many holes on this world, or squint a doubtful eye on the approach the movie revolves round simply a few white characters, on each side of the great/evil divide, slaughtering their approach by a subject of individuals of colour. It’s a curiously particular film, a gag aimed toward fans of joyously culty, messy nonsense like Weapons Akimbo or Crank — no less than, till that last combat all of a sudden begins taking the narrative critically. Even then, although, it’s greatest to observe Boy Kills World with the identical snarky detachment the remaining of its run time encourages.

Boy Kills World debuts in theaters on April 26.