Movie Review: Boy Kills World

 

Michael's Movie Grade: D-

A very annoying action/comedy.

Even if everything else about this movie was great (which it isn't), the comedy still would have ruined the film for me. Much of this is due to the awful voice over narration. Our main character is deaf and mute, but we hear his inner voice. That the inner voice was provided by H. Jon Benjamin (the voice of Archer and Bob from Bob's Burgers), while the character on screen is played by Bill Skarsgård. That the voice and the way the character looks being completely ill-suited for one another is supposed to be funny, it becomes a one-note joke that soon wears out its welcome. Only a few minutes after we first hear this voice over, it simply becomes too distracting and takes us out of the movie. Frankly this a trap too many movies with a quirky sense of humor fall in to. What can be funny as a brief joke does not necessarily remain funny for a feature length film. This is made worse by the fact that we hear his inner voice way too much throughout the film. This happens to the point that makes one wonder just why he is deaf and mute. The only thing it adds to the film is a bunch of unfunny jokes. It doesn't help that this voice over is still heavily used in the few scenes where this movie turns serious. Any drama that could have come out of these serious scenes is completely lost due to the ill-fitting voice. Even without this voice over the comedy is terrible. Often times it is simply weird for the sake of being weird. Putting our main characters on a Hunger Games type TV show, where they might be killed by cereal mascots is definitely bizarre, but it is not funny. This is the type of incoherent humor that comes from a bunch of middle schoolers joking around during recess. While those middle schoolers might be laughing their heads off talking about such random stuff, this juvenile and incoherent type of humor cannot translate to a movie.

This is not to say the rest of the movie is that great either. The characters are all incredibly bland and we don't really get a chance to know any of them. The plot twists don't make much sense and make even less sense the more you think about them. Some of the action scenes can be fun, but even they can feel too repetitive as they are all much too similar. 

One of the few things this movie has in its favor is that the relationship between our main character and his sister is kind of sweet and touching. However, this is hardly enough to make up for how much of a mess this movie is.