TIFF 2023 | Movie Review: "Boy Kills World" Is High-Octane Fun

10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars

Boy Kills World, writer/director Moritz Mohr’s debut feature and produced by legendary filmmaker Sam Raimi, is a high-octane and bloody good time. Starring Bill Skarsgård as the titular Boy, the film plays out like a pulse-pounding, wise-cracking videogame. With stylish camerawork, fun costume design, incredible stunt choreography, and an entertainingly star-studded supporting cast, Boy Kills World is a genre-defining action-comedy that gives films like Deadpool and Bullet Train a run for their money.

Image courtesy of TIFF

The film follows Boy, a deaf and mute one-man-army who was trained by the Shaman, played by legendary martial artist and TIFF Midnight Madness superstar Yayan Ruhian, and their plan to destabilize a worldwide fascist regime/crime family, the Van Der Koys. The film opens with an animated prologue, which establishes the film’s world through very blunt imagery and strong animated violence. The film then shows a lively training montage with a younger Boy (played by twin actors Nicholas and Cameron Crovetti from Big Little Lies and The Boys) and the Shaman, dazzlingly shot with very-low-altitude drone photography and animated camera movements. Soon, Boy grows into the hulking behemoth that is Bill Skarsgård in this movie, with a physique to rival his brother Alexander’s in last year’s The Northman. Skarsgård shines in his action scenes as well as the strange fish-out-of-water comedy, proving his incredible versatility as an actor in probably his most unconventional and eccentric performance yet.

Since Boy is deaf and mute, he can only read lips, but the film is full of Boy’s internal monologue reacting to the bizarre chaos onscreen. Not much of the humor is laugh-out-loud funny, but it never distracts from the fun Mohr and the cast are having. Jessica Rothe, Sharlto Copley, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman, Andrew Koji, Isaiah Mustafa, and Famke Janssen put a lot of personality and physicality into each of their characters, and their costume and prop design add lot of flair to this type of comic book and anime-inspired action film. The cinematography is really exciting and inventive (with a custom-made drone), with drone shots intensely circling and following the actors. The film is an almost dizzying experience, like Hardcore Henry mixed with Cyberpunk: 2077, with a nasty cheese grater action sequence that outdoes the centerpiece of this year's Evil Dead Rise.

Inspired by Park Chan-wook’s Revenge trilogy, Street Fighter, The Raid, and of course, Sam Raimi, Moritz Mohr’s debut film is one of the best action films of the year, despite some comedic missteps.