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Jon Benjamin’s smooth voice can only go so far as comedy backup. That seems to be what’s desperately needed for Boy Kills World, an absurd action picture that never fully finds its groove. While Benjamin’s voice is a treat, his wit is wasted in a role where he provides the most passive of commentary. He can’t perform miracles on a film that darts between a half-thought dystopian setting and highly stylized action sequences. Rarely does it do much to escape the simplistic reduction of being crowned a John Wick for the young adult crowd.
The titular Boy, played by Bill Skarsgård, seems to graduate from the Mad Max school of mute action stars. Having grown up in a society that favors a culling (which the film doesn’t even attempt to give a fancy name), Boy craves revenge on Hilda (Famke Janssen), the matriarch of this world that killed his mother. He receives training from a tough shaman mentor (Yayan Ruhian), getting the standard revenge-seeking regiment. Benjamin occasionally steps in to deliver some mildly amusing exposition about Boy’s mindset and why he favors this inner voice for being based on a video game announcer.
The generic nature of the grows further with additions. Announcing the culling is the hot-headed showman Glen (Sharlto Copley) while reading a script by the flustered intellectual Gideon (Brett Gelman). Glen wants to round up citizens for the death ceremony, but his short fuse leads to him shooting up the populace, who are quickly decimated by the mysterious hired known as June 27 (Jessica Rothe), a character most notable for her helmet televising her words like a ballpark board display. The boy will have to battle them all the way to the top to slaughter Hilda, all while still having hallucinations of his young sister (Quinn Copeland).
Very little builds in this film that seems to randomly tossed-on elements. The culling ceremony involves the killings on a TV set with tacky brand placement and mascots murdering. When Boy first witnesses this sight, his inner voice believes this may be a hallucination, only to realize it’s not. But it could be, right? The film already darts around fantasies and hauntings that make it hard to remain grounded or invested in anything all that real. The comedy limps along trying to crack absurd jokes around the elaborate and violent fight scenes. Sadly, most of that comedy revolves around stating the obvious. The punchline of a scene where a cinderblock accidentally falls on somebody, Benjamin’s commentary is on the sweaty hands of the one holding the cinderblock.
There’s a jarring effect to the combination of Skarsgård’s iron-fisted kill fest and Benjamin’s blustering voice over that comes off like a dilluted fusion of his Bob’s Burgers and Archer roles. Skarsgård is fun to watch on his silent rounds of punching and gunning so hard that bodies explode in chunks. In addition, Benjamin feels like a sportscaster trying too hard to form character in his commentary. It’s an aspect that reeks of the old Godzilla dubs but is more irritating for the cheesiness in the script than failures in lip sync. Part of me wishes the film had a firm silent cut, if only to give more of the film to Skarsgård than rely on a gimmick.
While most of the fights are brutal, they reach a point of prolonged notes that grow irritating. The grand two-on-one showdown in the finale seems to keep going on and on, even as characters have their heads smashed against concrete and their limbs constantly being sliced open. It’s an elongated moment that made me recall the Mortal Kombat games that would have fights continue despite such bloody injuries. As the film favors Boy’s obsession with video games, it makes sense that the film frames itself with this iconography, where Boy waits for the perfect opportunity when Benjamin can announce “Player Two has entered the match” or Game over.” But much like a fighting video game, the cutscenes become moments worth skipping, especially with such bland dystopian tropes strewn throughout this less-than-giddy festival of vicious violence.
Boy Kills World offers little more than its title suggests, coming off more video game than movie. It’s an action flick that lands fewer comedic jabs than literal ones, trying so hard to make Boy’s world absurd. He might as well kill it for being so derivative with setting and lukewarm with absurdity. The mindless and manic nature of the film’s scattershot techniques might be enough for action-hungry fans to salivate over, especially Skarsgård’s built-for-busting body. But even those folks might find themselves fast-forwarding through all the substandard plot twists to get to the next punch. They might even mute it a few times to appreciate more of the visual vigor than the ho-hum script.
