Cartoonishly delightful Boy Kills World is trying very hard, and that’s what matters

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

It can be a beautiful thing when a filmmaker has a vision, and producers just…let that vision happen.

See, for example, the Daniels, whose gonzo-bananas creativity and third-grade-level potty humor were allowed to flourish with Everything Everywhere all at Once, and everyone was so on board with the whole enterprise that the movie picked up a boatload of Oscars in addition to its prosperous theatrical run. In the right circumstances, it can be wonderful to let a director treat a movie as a way to throw every whiz-bang indulgence at the screen.

Boy Kills World is no Everything Everywhere, but it does share that movie’s attitude of “literally anything goes,” and also has the feeling of an audacious, attention-grabbing spec script that somehow went unsullied by studio notes. In terms of dramatic quality, Moritz Mohr’s violence-soaked live-action cartoon is closer to the Bullet Train end of the spectrum (i.e. lots of style, little substance), but the childlike (or is it childish?) sense of imagination powering the movie gives it heart worth rooting for, and it radiates infectious, over-the-top glee that’ll put a smile on your face, if only for the length of the runtime.

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

In a dystopian future, a deaf, mute vigilante named Boy (Bill Skarsgård) lives in the jungle with his teacher, Shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian). Since he was a child, Boy’s been training to become a human weapon so he can take down brutal dictator Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) and her family of oligarchs—the people responsible for killing Boy’s family and taking away his ability to hear and speak. 

We get an insight into Boy’s thoughts through the inner monologue he’s given himself (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, a voice Boy chose for himself based on a video game he enjoyed as a child). He’s also accompanied by the memory of his little sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), who acts as his conscience.

Quickly after departing for the city to take down the Van Der Koys, Boy meets Basho (Andrew Koji), an enthusiastic and joyfully violent resistance fighter, and his enigmatic partner Bennie (Isaiah Mustafa). They pull Boy into their own plan to overthrow the evil Van Der Koys and stop the annual Culling, a Hunger Games-ish event where government enemies are made to fight to the death in a game show setting populated by children’s cereal mascots.

As you may be able to tell from that plot synopsis, Boy Kills World has an Axe Cop-ish relationship to logic (minus the unfortunate edgelord pedigree). That is to say, everything within the world it’s set in makes sense to the characters, but feels to us normies like a 13-year-old may have come up with it to occupy a particularly dull study hall session. Boy Kills World is colorful, funny, absurd, and not too smart but aware of that and trying hard anyway.

In that vein, all of the performers are going as hard as they possibly can and seem to be cast accordingly. Skarsgård gives a Keatonesque performance as a leading man with no lines. Koji branches out from the stoic badass he played in Warrior to go hyperactive and chatty as Basho. However, all the best stunts in the movie belong not to him but to Ruhian—apparently a post-apocalyptic dystopia only has room for one Martial Arts Guy. 

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Mustafa’s character is particularly fun. Because we’re seeing Boy’s perspective, most of the dialogue we hear comes from his ability to read lips. Mustafa’s Bennie has a massive beard obscuring his mouth, which means all his lines come out as Pootie Tang-esque nonsense.

Boy Kills World is fun, but it’s not especially deep. Don’t come expecting all that ultra-violence and Adult Swim humor to actually comment on anything.

As storytelling, though, it’s joyfully creative in a way that most studio films don’t get to be, and that’s worth championing. It’s a crowd-pleaser that hasn’t been focus-grouped into oblivion. It’s wild and weird because it’s allowed to be, which is nothing short of amazing.

If nothing else, this movie is worth supporting just to tell the famously imagination-less studio heads in Hollywood that originality sells.