Boy Kills World (2024)

Review: written Apr 2024

Delirious, hyper-violent manga infused bonkers black comedy revenge movie

This gruesome uber-violent blend of martial arts, graphic novel stylings, blacker than black comedy, computer game references and wildly colourful and vivid action set pieces result in a fever dream wild journey of revenge and discovery. Yes it really is that nuts – melding apparent inspiration from the likes of Kick-Ass, Hunger Games, The Purge, Kill Bill , The Raid and probably a few non-mainstream Spaghetti Westerns to boot. Imagine Sam Raimi had decided to meld his combination of splatter violence and black humour with martial arts instead of horror, and you might not be too far from where this ends up.

Does it successfully meld all these influences? I’d say not, but golly does it manage to spill a lot of blood, break a lot of bones and squash a bunch of heads along the way having a go. I’d struggle to criticise its ambition, even if I wasn’t won over by the final result.

Not that plot is really the point, but Bill Skarsgard plays the mute boy, who suffers violence and loss at a young age, before being raised and trained by The Shaman (Yayan Ruhian) to seek revenge. Psychedelic training sessions play like long lost episodes of Kung Fu on steroids soon giving way to a full on mission to penetrate the villa of the matriarch of the totalitarian regime (Famke Janssen), and wreak bloody revenge. Along the way, he is aided in the flesh by an unlikely team he picks up along the way, and also in his head by his young sister, who reminds him of better times when they would play arcade games together, as if heaven is a place where Player 1 gets to play Player 2 forever. Needless to say, various boss-fights ensue before the grand finale.

These grandiose attempts at style don’t leave much room it seems for any more substance than that, with a few moderately interesting twists failing to fill that gap. That leaves us with an abundance of occasionally inventive violence, in an otherwise derivative buffet of a plot.. a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But if you’re looking for tongue in cheek violence, this might be the most fulsome serving of the year. Spiky, gnarly and maybe not quite as witty as it thinks, this isn’t for the faint hearted.