Boy Kills World (2024)

It always happens. One great success leads to numerous imitators. That can lead to other successes, as has happened in recent years with a certain kind of action cinema. It can also lead to the occasional mid-step, at best. Boy Kills World is a mis-step, although it’s one that I know plenty of people enjoyed more than I did.

Bill Skarsgård plays our main character, a mute man who narrates his own life in an inner voice (H. Jon Benjamin) that he used to enjoy hearing in one of his favourite videogames. He is living in a strange dystopian world, one in which the rulers occasionally just pick people to kill/sacrifice, and his own loss drives him on a wild and bloody quest for revenge.

What you get here, when it works, is an enjoyably creative killing spree centering on a main character who is skilled and fortunate enough to deal with waves of disposable villains. The action is certainly fun and energetic, and everything is underlined by a streak of hunour that many will enjoy (although it didn’t work for me).

Director Mortiz Mohr, making his feature debut, feels like someone making a feature debut. This has a great idea at the heart of it, it’s trying to boil down a pure and simple action movie aesthetic into something even more pure and simple, but the end result is too messy, with a muddled plot, clumsy tonal movement, and characters that you don’t ever care about, even if Skarsgård has an innate likability to him.

The script, fully fleshed out by Arend Remmers and Tyler Burton Smith, is a mess. I never once believed the world depicted onscreen, and the attempt to add some twists and turns were altogether unsuccessful. Either keep things rooted in pure action madness or try to deliver plotting that people will care about. This moves between both, and that caused it to leave me unsatisfied with both aspects.

Skarsgård makes up for many failings though. His wide-eyed turn is very enjoyable, and he looks more than capable when in full-on rage fighting mode. That’s a good thing indeed, because almost everyone else here is wasted. Michelle Dockery, Sharlto Copley, Brett Gelman, Famke Janssen, all wasted. It should be a crime to waste Janssen this badly. Jessica Rothe is also wasted, as is the fantastic Yayan Ruhian, although he gets a few good moments throughout, and it’s at least good to see him in a fairly central role.

I really wanted to enjoy this. I expected to enjoy it. While I didn’t hate it, I was surprised by how poor it was. Is it worth a watch one evening when you want some bloody entertainment to accompany snacks and drinks? Yes. Is it worth a rewatch at any point, and will it stay long in your memory once you go on to many of the other action movies from the past few years? Absolutely not.

4/10

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Bullet Train (2022)

A comedy action movie, emphasis on the comedy, starring Brad Pitt as a professional criminal who wants nothing in his life but good vibes, Bullet Train has a lot going for it. On paper. Directed by David Leitch, starring Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Joey King, Michael Shannon, and Hiroyuki Sanada, and mixing action and comedy on the titular bullet train, what’s not to love?

Pitt is on a simple mission. He is given the codename “Ladybug” and tasked with retrieving a briefcase from the bullet train. Ideally, he should get on, grab the case, and then get off at the next stop. Meanwhile, Lemon (Henry) and Tangerine (Taylor-Johnson) are looking after someone they are supposed to keep safe, in exchange for a decent payday. Meanwhile, Prince (King) wants to get revenge on a number of people, as does Wolf (played by Bad Bunny. MEANWHILE, others start to board the train with their own deadly agendas. Ladybug shouldn’t even be there, as he is filling in for an agent named Carver, and it isn’t long until he wishes he hadn’t taken the job.

Based on a book by Kôtarô Isaka, turned into a screenplay by Zak Olkewicz, this is a bizarre throwback to a time when every other film was trying to rip off Tarantino or Guy Ritchie. I am not sure if the problem lies with the source material, having not read the book, but there’s a smugness throughout that isn’t matched by the dialogue or plotting. Everything feels far too much like a Rube Goldberg machine, an excessive amount of moving parts and complications leading to a very underwhelming final result, and the eclectic cast isn’t good enough, overall, to help it all along.

Leitch, who has spent the last five years directing films that mix action and comedy better than this one, fails to find the right way through the dense plotting. There aren’t enough moments of impressive action, the comedy always feels like a separate component, rather than an intertwining strand, and any sense of entertaining spectacle is undermined by the overuse of CGI. This is a busy movie in so many ways, often painfully so, and I only felt that working in its favour during an enjoyable finale that somehow managed to tie up every strand and provide a punchline for every running gag (so fair play to Olkewicz for saving his best work until the end of the movie).

Pitt is fine in the lead role, playing a character we have seen a version of in a number of different movies now. The main thing that allows him to stand out is what he views as a constant string of bad luck, something that allows the script to keep getting bigger and wilder, but there’s a moderately interesting idea tucked away here about perspective, and how bad luck in one way may be good luck in the long run. Taylor-Johnson is bad, I just didn’t like him in this role (and I can only imagine how much this movie could have been improved with someone else there), but Henry does a bit better, helping to make their scenes together more bearable. I don’t want to rate every single main player, especially when I can spend some time highlighting just how good both Shannon and Sanada are. Both get in on the action for the third act, and both take this movie up an entire notch or two. King is okay, Bad Bunny is . . . okay, Zazie Beetz is great, but sadly underused, and there are a few cameos that properly amused me.

It certainly tries to keep the momentum going for most of the 2+ hour runtime, I will give it that, and the soundtrack has some great choices, although I wanted even more. I MIGHT revisit and reappraise this at some point, to see if I enjoy it more while spending less time trying to unpick the various plot threads, but for now I have to tell people that it’s not recommended. It’s tonally very messy, it’s comedically very hit and miss (but one hit, a sequence showing two men tallying up the numbers killed in their most recent job, is superb), and it spends a lot of time going off the rails before sorting itself out just in time for that enjoyable finale.

4/10

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Snake Eyes (2021)

AKA Snake Eyes: G. I. Joe Origins.

Directed by Robert Schwentke, who very possibly thinks it a minor miracle every time he is handed another film project, and written by Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse, and Evan Spiliotopoulos (the first two having worked together on many films before this one), Snake Eyes isn't a film with many signs of greatness from the list of names who worked on it. But it's a lead role for Henry Golding, and another film giving some screentime to Samara Weaving, so I decided to give it a go. 

It's not good.

It's not really that bad either. It's just there, not as much fun as the first live action G.I. Joe movie, but a bit better than the second one (which was weighed down by the presence of a somnambulistic Bruce Willis, who actually appears in dictionaries now right beside the definition of somnambulism). Annoyingly, this had potential. Some key characters are cast well, others not so much, and I'd love to see Golding get a vehicle that takes him to the superstar level he deserves. This isn't that.

Golding plays Snake Eyes, of course, a young man out to avenge the death of his father. He'll do anything to find his father's killer, and that journey places him alongside a powerful clan that includes Tommy (Andrew Koji), Akiko (Haruka Abe), Sen (Eri Ishida), and a powerful jewel which is desired by the dangerous Kenta (Takehiro Hira). Snake Eyes is tested a number of times, in challenges that involve characters played by Iko Uwais and Peter Mensah, and the second half of the film also brings in familiar characters such as the Baroness (Úrsula Corberó) and Scarlett (Samara Weaving).

There’s some stuff to like here. Golding being the main highlight, but also Abe, Ishida, Uwais, and Weaving. That’s a good selection of players. Unfortunately, they are alongside Koji, who drags down almost every scene he is in, saddled with a character who has to do little more than look brooding and wait to take on the name that fans of this property will know is coming. 

The action isn’t terribly done, but you wouldn’t always know that when the editing gets in the way of it. Whether out of necessity, to cover up some limitations from cast members, or due to a misjudged idea of stylisation, the editing gets in the way of most of the energetic set-pieces. It is far from the worst we have seen in this kind of fare, but this material was crying out for more fixed camera shots that could highlight the fluidity and speed of the fighters. 

The other disappointing main element here is the lack of wit. People may not want their action films to be overfilled with humour, but being too serious throughout feels just as bad, especially when you’re presenting a film developed from a toy line. The only person who gets to really have fun is Weaving, which then makes it feel as if she has wandered in from another movie. 

I know that I will end up watching this again, and probably owning it at some point, but that is more to do with my completist approach to movies. I wouldn’t really recommend it to many other people though, unless you are as big a fan of Golding as I am (which you should be). Maybe next time he will get a better script, or better director, or maybe he needs a better agent.

6/10

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