Boy Kills World’s bloody slapstick falls short of genuine wit

BOY KILLS WORLD ★★½

(MA) 111 minutes

Having spent a fair amount of my life watching action and horror movies, I can testify that becoming desensitised to screen violence is a real thing. A first feature shot in South Africa by the German director Moritz Mohr, Boy Kills World showcases an untold number of shootings and stabbings, the odd decapitation, some grisly mayhem involving a cheese grater – but none of this prompted much reaction in me, beyond a feeling the camerawork was more frantic than strictly necessary, and that Dev Patel pulled off the kitchen-utensil-as-weapon routine better in Monkey Man.

Have I grown jaded? Maybe so. But it could be, too, that Boy Kills World suffers from the wrong kind of excess, not just in its approach to action but in the design of the plot, which piles one gimmick on top of another. Played as a young adult by Bill Skarsgard, whose cheekbones could be weapons in themselves, the nameless Boy of the title is an innocent-turned-warrior, born into a dystopian society similar to the one in The Hunger Games.

Having lost his family under violent circumstances at a young age, he finds refuge in the jungle surrounding his city, where he learns martial arts from a scrawny but hard-boiled Shaman (Yayan Ruhian from the Raid films), whose methods of instruction include burying his protege alive. Being deaf, the Boy doesn’t talk, but we’re made privy to his inner monologue, delivered in gruff tones by the comic H. Jon Benjamin, chatting away like Deadpool or a YouTuber playing a video game.

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On top of this, the Boy holds frequent imagined conversations with his long-lost younger sister, who serves as his confidante throughout his quest for revenge against the Van Der Coy family, the city’s aristocratic rulers (curiously, this society is portrayed as effectively a matriarchy, with the ultimate power in the hands of a demented recluse played by Famke Janssen). All this takes place on the day of the annual event known as the Culling because honestly, when else would you pick?

There are points where Boy Kills World promises to spiral into genuine delirium, as if Mohr and his team had conceived the script in the hope of securing the services of Nicolas Cage (cast either as the offscreen narrator or the Shaman – or in the role played by Brett Gelman, a forlorn Van Der Coy brother who fancies himself the family intellectual).

But the satire never quite comes into focus (we get closest in the genuinely grotesque scenes devoted to the Culling, a lavish televised spectacle akin to Oscar night). Even by the standards of comic book cinema, the film’s world remains thinly imagined – and while Benjamin’s voice-over is flippant enough to stop us taking the story seriously, it falls well short of actual wit. Still, when it comes to the kind of bloody slapstick that involves someone getting their limbs sliced off or their head smashed in, Boy Kills World can’t be accused of stopping halfway.