Boy Kills World
Year: 2024
Rating: R
Length: 111 minutes / 1.85 hours
Video game movies are gaining some respect after the disastrous jump to the silver screen in the 1990s. It’s interesting, then, that Boy Kills World (2024) takes all the cliches of the beat-’em-up and hack-and-slash video games from the arcades and makes a movie out of a game that doesn’t exist. The problem is this movie also adheres to a lot of the tropes that made the video game movies of the 1990s sub-par to the ones that exist today.
Don’t get me wrong here. Boy Kills World is fun if you just turn off your brain and enjoy the ridiculous ride. Bill Skarsgard is great as the “silent protagonist”—made even better by H. Jon Benjamin’s narration of the character’s internal thoughts. The action is intense and there are a few set pieces that play to the strengths of the more interesting characters. And as a video game movie, its structure of “mini bosses” scattered throughout fully shows it definitely understood the assignment. Unfortunately, a lot of video games don’t have a lot to adapt, and this self-aware film also suffers from that.
The handful of twists in Boy Kills World are woefully telegraphed like a huge Souls-like boss with an unwieldy weapon. It’s not that they’re so obvious, but that they feel uninspired. But that’s to be expected when the main point of video games like the ones this movie tries to adapt is to mow through as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible just to get to the last boss. Other movies have tried the self-aware approach and had it work well for them. Boy Kills World‘s self-awareness falls flat because the thing it’s based on simply does not exist.
An attempt at a self-aware video game adaptation, I give Boy Kills World 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
