Boy Kills World

It is a dream come true for any aspiring film director to get hired to direct a first feature film. I’m sure it must be even more exciting whenthat inexperienced director is asked to turn that  short movie they made into a feature. That is exactly what happened to German born filmmaker Moritz Mohr with “Boy Kills World”. In addition, Sam Raimi is one of the producers of the film; so, what could go wrong? Unfortunately, quite a bit so let’s get into it.

In a future post-apocalyptic city, Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) murders the family of Boy (Bill Skarsgård). Vowing revenge, he becomes a student of the Shaman (Yayan Ruhian) who turns him into a weapon of pure destruction. As the annual Cullen is about to take place, the “celebration” where his family was killed, Boy is ready to unleash pure fury on the entire Van Der Koy family.

When you see a commercial or trailer for “Boy Kills World” you may think it’s based on a video game or a comic, since those types of stories are still very popular in cinema. I wish I had seen the original short because maybe a condensed version of this would have been better to watch. A director can be influenced by other auteurs. It’s quite natural, however, they need to find their own voice as well and when it comes to this project, it felt Moritz Mohr was copying what he had seen in other pictures during his life rather than putting his own spin on things.

There are several fight scenes throughout “Boy Kills World”, many of them are quite bloody thanks to CGI created gore. As I watched them, I thought how eerily similar they were to the fights seen in “The Kingsman” franchise. When I saw in the closing credits that Dawid Szatarski was responsible for all the action and fight sequences I understood, as he was the coordinator on those movies.

The character of Boy is both deaf and mute, but he has internal monologue. That voice mimics the last video game he heard. That is part of the humor included in “Boy Kills World.” H. Jon Benjamin provides the voice. Most people know him for doing the voice of Bob in “Bob’s Burgers.” He basically narrates for the benefit of the audience, which leads to a lot of exposition. While using this voice is amusing at times, it doesn’t provide for a lot of laughs. That can be chalked up to Mohr’s inexperience and Lucian Barnard, his editor, who could not save those jokes in post-production. Barnard has never edited either a comedy or an action movie, so he probably wasn’t the best choice to edit this movie.

Have you ever walked out of a movie and thought how the trailer of it was better than the movie itself? That pretty much sums up “Boy Kills World.” The movie and story had a lot of potential, but inexperience is what doomed it in the end. If Sam Raimi decided he wanted to direct it probably would have turned out better However, sometimes new directors deserve a shot. Sometimes they rise to the occasion and sometimes they do not.

1.5 Swords