At the very least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded motion film that offers some exceedingly match performers — its hard-body star Invoice Skarsgard very a lot included — an opportunity to flaunt their bodily abilities. To guage from all of the grunting, the straining muscle groups and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, together with a couple of of his nimble co-stars and a military of stunt performers, places in severe work to attempt to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too dangerous the filmmakers have been incapable of doing the identical.
Set in a reduction dystopian hellscape, the story facilities on, ta-da, Boy (Skarsgard), a saucer-eyed dynamo with an uninteresting again story who can neither hear nor speak. As soon as upon a time, for causes which can be laboriously teased out, he landed within the jungle, the place he was taken beneath wing by a punishing caretaker, the Shaman. This cat is performed with quite a lot of grimacing by the Indonesian martial-arts phenom Yayan Ruhian, of the “Raid” motion pictures. Ruhian additionally reveals up in “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” which isn’t good, but continues to be higher than “Boy Kills World” as a result of it was made by individuals who know find out how to showcase stunt preventing.
“Boy Kills World,” against this, constantly undermines its stunts with frustratingly clumsy filmmaking. Many times, the frantic digicam goes overly shut when it ought to go huge — turning our bodies right into a chaotic jumble of elements — and the uneven over-editing makes issues worse. I’m unsure what the director Moritz Mohr thought he was doing right here. (Sam Raimi is among the producers.) It’s additionally unclear why anybody even bothered to concoct a narrative for Boy, as a result of the one level of this ridiculousness is to look at Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take quite a lot of brutal punishment in order that he can dole out extra. Rinse, repeat.
The story includes, yup, a revenge mission that the filmmakers fuss with by toggling between the previous and current however that principally finds Boy searching a cartoon despot (Famke Janssen) and her minions (Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman). Andrew Koji additionally reveals up as a sidekick for Boy, whom Skarsgard performs as a guileless killing machine. As he did in “It,” the actor makes shrewd use of the whites of his eyes, turning them into attention-grabbing beacons. That’s comprehensible on condition that one other actor (H. Jon Benjamin, of “Bob’s Burgers”) supplies Boy’s inside voice utilizing a putatively humorous tough-guy drone. This gimmick will get outdated quick, as does the film, at the same time as its hero and concepts stay underbaked.
Boy Kills World
Rated R for motion film preventing and killing. Operating time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
