Boy Kills World asks, ‘What makes video game movies fun?’

The most crucial thing to know going into the action-thriller Boy Kills World is that it eventually features a phenomenally bloody fight scene — a brutal extended throwdown where faces are smashed, fingers purposefully dig into open wounds, and combatants slowly drag a sharp object through each other’s bodies, ripping through skin and muscle with a tactile squelch. It’s a fight so grueling and brutal that even seasoned action-movie veterans might clench their teeth and mutter in reflexive empathy.

But while squeamish viewers will want to know how messy the movie gets so they can steer clear, everyone else will want to know what to expect because Boy Kills World otherwise seems so weightless, goofy, and far from reality that it lacks any kind of serious combat stakes. The smirky way director Moritz Mohr frames combats around video game references — complete with voice-over narration saying things like “Fatality!” and “Player two wins!” — doesn’t exactly prepare viewers for a face-off where the combatants’ pain meaningfully matters and the characters actually seem to be getting hurt.

But that final fight gives Boy Kills World more weight than the rest of its run time, and opens it up to action and martial arts fans who might otherwise be put off by the movie’s strident, referential humor. The film was largely built strictly for a specific brand of video game movie fans: It’s a checklist of retro beat-’em-up references and meta comedy tropes that some audiences are inevitably going to find broad, excessive, and off-putting, and some are going to find playful and energizing.

This isn’t quite Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, with its pop-up “Pow!” and “Kerblam!” animated effects for big hits, or its antagonists exploding into coin-drop victory rewards at the end of every fight. But it’s just about as silly and surfacey, with world-building that’s little more than an apathetic shrug, and a plot that’s largely an excuse for creatively staged fights that range from dopey humor to surreal mind game to that final, surprisingly serious battle.

Bill Skarsgård stars as the otherwise unnamed Boy, a tragic victim, comically hapless doofus, and world-class combatant whose skills were honed through years of jungle training with The Shaman (martial arts movie stalwart Yayan Ruhian, of The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2). Boy is none too bright and painfully naïve, and he’s all-in on the mission The Shaman has given him: to take down Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the totalitarian figurehead ruling their country.

Naturally, she has a small army of well-armed mooks and a monstrous family Boy has to battle his way through as he climbs the ladder to avenge the family she took from him — including his little sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), whose death he vividly remembers, but who hangs around him as a cheery hallucination who sees his grim battle for vengeance as a fun adventure where she gets to dress up like a ninja butterfly.

Boy had his tongue removed and his eardrums burned out when he was a child, part of the legacy of brutality in his vaguely delineated, cliché-riddled fascist state. His deafness is played for uncomfortable laughs — all the audible dialogue throughout the film is stylized as what he gets from lip-reading, so when he meets someone he can’t interpret clearly, they appear to be spouting gibberish that Boy then literalizes and vividly visualizes. And his muteness is played even more for comedy, thanks to a wall-to-wall voice-over from H. Jon Benjamin, doing his best Mortal Kombat–announcer bass rumble as he narrates Boy’s thoughts.

That voice-over is taken from Boy’s favorite childhood video game, Super Dragon Punch Force 3, a fictional game getting its own release as a tie-in project. And it’s a make-or-break element for Boy Kills World. Anyone who doesn’t see Benjamin’s nonstop stream-of-consciousness chatter as hilarious is likely to find this movie unbearably grating. Mina’s chirpy commentary on Boy’s violent misadventures in assassination is just as intrusive: He knows she isn’t really there, but still can’t stop himself from arguing with her or fighting to save her from danger, which throws an extra layer of slapstick on top of the already absurd action.

Image: Roadside Attractions/Everett Collection

Boy Kills World feels like a litmus test for self-identified fans of video game movies. It’s a worksheet-style experience where anyone can add up the elements this movie does and doesn’t share with other films in its subgenre, and do the math about what makes a video game movie really land as a video game movie for them. Boy Kills World doesn’t have the specific, recognizable characters; nostalgia factor; or cultural cachet of a Sonic, Super Mario Bros., or Minecraft movie. It does have the tongue-in-cheek attitude that beat-’em-ups are not-too-serious fun, and that everyone recognizes the tropes and references that come with them. It isn’t immersive or experiential, but it does follow the escalating flunky-to-miniboss-to-boss-fight dynamics familiar from so many games.

A character taking extreme damage, eating something, and shaking that damage off? Yep. Cutscenes that progress the story while the protagonist stands by and can’t interact with anything? Yep. Ridiculously colorful antagonists, including a woman (Jessica Rothe) whose LED-enhanced motorcycle-helmet visor spells out insults and orders in combat? Check. Unlikely weapons, from improvised stabbing tools (in one case a carrot) to a brass-knuckles-plus-gun combo? Ayep. A power fantasy where one person can slice his way through an entire oppressive government, one fight at a time, through sheer skill? Sure. A story built around elaborate combat sequences? Certainly. All Boy Kills World is missing is upgrades, loot drops, inventory-swapping, and gathering mechanics for crafting. (Don’t laugh; some video game-inspired movies lean hard into those kinds of mechanics.)

Image: Roadside Attractions/Everett Collection

It isn’t that any of these things specifically defines a video game movie, or even, more specifically, a satirical action movie expressly made to feel like an installment in a specific video game subgenre. It’s more that the game of recognize-the-trope or get-the-in-joke is the entirety of Boy Kills World. Mohr knows exactly the audience he’s aiming for, and it’s a fairly specific, narrow one. It isn’t enough to know the kind of games he’s lampooning, have a strong affection for them, and have a taste for graphic bloodshed without needing it to be played seriously.

It also isn’t enough to find Benjamin endlessly hilarious, though that certainly helps. Boy Kills World requires viewers to thread a specific needle of caring about Boy and a few other side characters enough to engage with their goals and feelings, but not caring so much that they poke at the many holes in this world, or squint a dubious eye at the way the film revolves around just a few white characters, on both sides of the good/evil divide, slaughtering their way through a field of people of color. It’s a curiously specific movie, a gag aimed at fans of joyously culty, messy nonsense like Guns Akimbo or Crank — at least, until that final fight suddenly starts taking the narrative seriously. Even then, though, it’s best to watch Boy Kills World with the same snarky detachment the rest of its run time encourages.

Boy Kills World debuts in theaters on April 26.