Tag: Beat-’em-Up

Boy Kills WorldYear: 2024Rating: RLength: 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...