Player One Has Entered the Game

Film: Boy Kills World
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

I remember seeing the trailer for Boy Kills World and thinking that it’s exactly the kind of mindless bullshit that I want to watch on a big screen. If I’m paying for the movie, I’m very much a bread-and-circuses kind of guy. Give me over-the-top stunts and gun-fu, and I’m happy to fork over my $10 or more to watch. But Boy Kills World came and went almost immediately. I don’t know if it even opened within 15 miles of where I live. That’s not always a bad sign for a film, but it frequently is.

This is an action movie from start to finish, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Boy Kills World is the sort of action movie that gets the adrenaline junkie excited. Think The Raid: Redemption as a similar film with the same sort of simple plot and relentless action montages. The plot is high concept—in an oppressive society, a young boy’s family is murdered as an example by the ruling class. The boy (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti) is left for dead, but is rescued by a man called the Shaman (Yayan Ruhian, who was in The Raid) and trained to hunt down the family that rules the area.

While there are plenty of flashbacks to the young Boy (and that is how he is listed in the credits), most of the film will take place with the adult Boy (Bill Skarsgård). We learn quickly that Boy is both deaf and mute thanks to his ordeal. What that means for the audience is that we are going to experience the film through Boy’s inner monologue, using a voice that narrated his favorite video game as a child. That voice is performed by H. Jon Benjamin.

I need to talk about Benjamin for a second here. If you’ve watched either Bob’s Burgers or Archer, you’re going to recognize his voice immediately as the title character from both shows. Benjamin is arguably wildly successful as a voice actor, and yet he seems to be incredibly limited, capable of performing his own voice and no others.

H. Jon Benjamin is also, sad to say, the biggest problem with the film. Benjamin’s voice seems specifically tuned to comedy. That might be because that’s what he is best known for, but there is a sense of natural sarcasm in the way he talks. That works for a lot of Boy Kills World, because the cartoonish action. It fits to have that sort of surreal and weird narration for action that is similarly off the hook. That said, when the film takes some more serious turns, and it does, Benjamin seems far more ill-suited to the task.

Of course there’s going to be a big reveal. Films like this don’t exist without a big reveal. There are only a couple of places that the reveal can go, though, and I predicted about 80% of it within a minute of meeting the relevant characters. I understand the value of tropes and that often there is a usefulness in creating a story where the particular beats are expected in the same way that listening to music causes that expectation of the song coming to a close with the resolution of the chord progression. But here, that’s not really the case. The story beats that happen aren’t necessary or expected tropes; they are clichés.

What this means is that we’re left with really only one major aspect to judge the film on: fight choreography. On this front, Boy Kills World is pretty great. The fight scenes are very much what you want to see in an action movie if you are a lover of intense martial arts and gun-fu style action. Thanks to the presence of Yayan Ruhian, there’s a lot here that is reminiscent of The Raid an the Pencak Silat fighting style. Naturally, these scenes are otherworldly, and come from the same place as the best of Jackie Chan’s scenes.

The question is whether or not the action scenes are enough. There are a lot of action movies with good fighting scenes, but most of them have a much more substantial plot than this one, or at least characters who are more than their fighting style. This one isn’t.

Don’t get me wrong—there are funny moments. When Boy teams up with a few others to take down the ruling class, he discovers that he can’t lipread Benny (Isaiah Mustafa), and this is a bit that works pretty well. But the movie frequently shifts to a much more serious tone, and those shifts don’t work very well.

It's also worth saying that the character of Gideon is not played by Paul Giamatti, but Brett Gelman. The similarity is uncanny, though.

Why to watch Boy Kills World: Fight choreography.
Why not to watch: For all of the “it’s an action movie” cred it has, it doesn’t know what it wants to be.