Boy Kills World (MA15+. 111 minutes)
Three stars
Gosh that Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard has good genes which he passed on to all of his children. They then gifted us with their shirtless performances as oldest son Alexander did in True Blood, Tarzan and The Northman, and now middle child Bill follows suit as a buffed-up assassin in this comic book stylised action film from German filmmaker Moritz Mohr.
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It was hard to appreciate the graceful physicality of Bill Skarsgard as he played the clown-coded alien child-killer Pennywise in the two It films, but his physical transformation for this film is important for his character to be plausible as a one-man killing machine.
Boy (played by twins Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti as a child, and Skarsgard as an adult) is a deaf and mute orphaned survivor of a massacre that killed his mother and sister. He lives in the jungles outside of a nameless country's capital city with his adopted father-figure and martial arts sensei, Shaman (Yayan Ruhian).
Shaman isn't parenting Boy with any love or affection, but instead is training him to become the ultimate assassin, whose endgame will be to slaughter the ruling family of the capital city.
That training involves things like burying Boy into a grave with a bamboo straw for air, studying combat techniques, and blowing mind-bending drugs into Boy's face.
On a visit to the capital, Boy learns that it is the anniversary of his mother's death.
Despite Shaman saying he isn't ready, he takes off on the trail of the ruling Van Der Koy family, including psychotic despot Hilda (Famke Janssen), smarmy puppet ruler Glen (Sharlto Copley) and his puppet-master wife Melanie (Michelle Dockery) as well as wannabe mastermind Gideon (Brett Gelman) and their head hench-person June27 (Jessica Rothe).
Helping out Boy on his revenge quest are Basho (Andrew Koji) and Bennie (Isiah Mustafa) and, acting as his conscience, the ghost of his slaughtered sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland).
Cutting together a good trailer can be a wonderful marketing tool for a film.
But if this is done too well it can set up expectations the feature film can't hope to deliver on, and that was the case for me with this film.
Not that it isn't well made, and particularly features some of the most balletic violence and fight sequences as orchestrated by stunt choreographer Dawid Szatarski, where bodies fly with the physics-defying rag-doll movements of crash test dummies.
Mohr throws everything and the kitchen sink at this highly stylised actioner.
Some of it works, like the choice to give the deaf and mute Boy an internal voice from H. John Benjamin (the voice of Archer) whose gravelly tones Boy remembers from the kick-boxing video games he and his sister used to play in happier times.
One of Mohr's more successful ongoing gags comes where the lip-reading Boy misreads dialogue spoken by bearded characters whose bushy facial hair covers their lips, and we hear their dialogue as nonsense sentences.
Writers Tyler Burton-Smith and Arend Remmers go for style over substance, but that seems to fit in this bubblegum video game of a film, with its characters written and played as extreme caricatures.
There's a lot to love about the film's production design.
I couldn't tell where the CGI ended and the set design began in the run-to-seed future world the characters inhabit.
The lighting team certainly loved their colours, with barely a scene where the actors aren't bathed in a blue or orange neon.
Skarsgard, glow-up at the gym working for him, shows wonderful range and has a dancer's grace as he slaughters his way through the rest of the cast.
