Welcome to The Hunger Games, if no one was holding back. Boy Kills World drops us into a fascist dystopia where similar forms of televised bloodsport dictate the social order. These keep the citizens sated and slavering, when they’re not the unfortunate ones who’ve been plucked for knockabout sacrifice – the victims specially chosen so that a family of despots called the van der Koys can hold undisputed sway.
The world-building for this berserk odyssey is accomplished in a frenetic first few minutes you may find hard to keep up with: it’s as if the film kicks off with its own trailer. We learn that Bill Skarsgård’s character, a ludicrously ripped deaf-mute known only as “Boy”, watched his mother and sister gunned down, then escaped into the jungle; we zip through his adolescence being trained in martial arts by a helpful shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian); and we know he’s coming back for revenge.
The film’s fetish for a red-and-yellow palette may put you in mind of Kill Bill, but there are a zillion other reference points it blithely absorbs, from Oldboy to Scott Pilgrim and, inevitably, Deadpool. Somehow, the knowing obnoxiousness of the tone lands the right way up here: it’s less shiny or smug than inventively, gaudily weird.
First-time director Moritz Mohr, who persuaded Sam Raimi to lend his producing clout, throws the kitchen sink at it: the film has a body count in the high dozens, and relentless passages of slickly cartoonish action choreography. Heads are caved in, hands pulled off, but all in a spirit of daft excess.
Mohr isn’t content to let his camera sit back and watch the stunt performers earn their pay. It swoops and glides all over the place, as if it can’t resist joining in. Some may find the effect frazzling, but the film’s hyperactive form is certainly of a piece with its video-game sensibility – it just won’t quit.