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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Child's Play (2019)

Much like the killer doll at the centre of it all, there's something about Child's Play that is just a bit off from the very first scenes. I am never automatically against remakes, but this one just seemed like a pretty bad idea, and one that was being churned out for the wrong reasons. Whether you like them or not, the original movie series was still growing under the watchful eye of Don Mancini. All seems to be going ahead with the TV show idea, which I hope comes out soon enough for me to be able to forget all about this attempt to reboot a fresh money-maker.

As you may have already surmised, I didn't like Child's Play. It's a film that doesn't ever make the right decisions at any point, treating viewers as if they will all be situated perfectly within the teen age bracket that it is aiming for (and I know some teens who won't be impressed either).

It all starts with a disgruntled factory worker removing safety protocols from a toy doll before then committing suicide. One thing leads to another, and that doll (a Buddi who decides to name himself Chucky, voiced by Mark Hamill) ends up being owned by young Andy Barclay (Gabriel Bateman). Andy lives with his mother (Karen, played by Aubrey Plaza), it's a new home for them, there's a man on the scene, there's a police detective who is often in the building as he visits his mother, and a few other characters that are supposed to be worth watching. Chucky starts killing, all for the sake of his friendship with Andy, and his ability to be linked to various apps makes him a lot more dangerous.

I am not familiar with the previous film by director Lars Klevberg, or writer Tyler Burton Smith, but it seems, rightly or wrongly, that they were picked here as a couple of people who would toe the line and give the studio what was expected. I am assuming an awful lot here, and may be being very unfair, but it's hard to see anything here that represents a unique vision or talent. If that was the case, it would be easier to believe that Klevberg and/or Smith were chosen because someone had seen something prominent in their work that they thought could work well with the  Child's Play concept.

Here are the things that work in this movie. The music, another great bit of work by Bear McCreary (who has been on top form recently). The casting of Mark Hamill in the vital voice role of Chucky. The first major human murder scene.

Almost everything else fails. Take, for example, the fact that a character is slightly hearing-impaired. This is all well and good if it is for representation. It isn't though. It's mentioned once or twice in a way that makes us think it will be very important later in the movie, and then isn't used in any way that feels necessary. Take a scene in which Chucky uses an app to terrorise and kill someone. Except he doesn't. The big set-piece ends with our knife-wielding doll . . . wielding a knife. One death scene has a character jumping up to stand on a desk that has a bloody circular saw on it. The relationship between mother and son never feels real, unlike the original film, there aren't any actual scares (although, to be fair, the film does provide a couple of amusing moments, which prove that it occasionally works as the black comedy it is trying to be), and the third act staggers from one horribly ill-conceived moment to the next.

Bateman is okay as Andy, Plaza is as underused as she so often is in more mainstream fare, and Smith is the best character in the movie. Nobody stinks up the place, not even the other younger cast members who work alongside Bateman in the strand of the film that plays out a scenario building up the whole "the kids will save everyone" vibe, but there's also nobody good enough to help distract from the many shortcomings of the film.

Horror movies can be fun, they can be dumb, they can be sheer entertainment without having to be anything else. But there have to be certain things done right to allow film-makers to get away with that. It can be hard to put a finger on the things that have the opposite effect, sometimes it's just an overwhelming feeling of laziness, sometimes it's a lack of logic that breaks the rules set out within the movie universe, but this film has enough of them to spoil your enjoyment. Well, it has enough to spoil my enjoyment. Others have had fun with it.

4/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.