Watching Boy Kills World was one of the most aggravating experiences I’ve had in a theater in a long time. I didn’t enjoy the movie, but it was more of case of it bugging the hell out of it me than boring me. Something about its smug, cocky attitude bugged the hell out of me.

The flick is about a city under totalitarian rule following a civil war. A kid survives the assassination of his family and is now being trained to be a fighter by a mad monk. As he ages into the well-formed body of Bill Skarsgård, he plans his revenge.

This movie thinks its the cleverest, cockiest, cookiest, most sarcastic film ever and boy does it want you not to forget it. It’s got a deliberately overly-edited sense of goofiness. Its so proud of how deliberately a parody of action films it is while also being a waaaacky action film itself. Soooo wacky. So unhinged. So edgy. So full of itself. So overproduced. So over-edited. Can’t you see how unhinged it is? It’s the cock-of-the-walk of unhinged action films. It’s so very so so so so.

The hero doesn’t speak but has the inner voice of a gravel-voiced tough-guy video game character cliché. The gag is amusing since the dialog is so intentionally stereotypically over-the-top… and I smiled a few times at the hackiness. But It made me think they inserted this dialog after realizing a silent protagonist – even one who exists in an already heightened world of goofiness – wasn’t going to work. It turned out to be sickly-sweet icing caking icing caking icing. Too much of an alleged good thing.

And you can tell this is true in the film’s final thirty minutes. A change to the story hits and the movie finally gets interesting… it even stops being so manic and settles into a more straight-forward kick-ass action film. And it almost leaves the vaunted inner monolog behind, almost as though the film makers realizes it would have gotten in the way of the good part of the film. But if the monolog got in the way of the good part of the film, what does that say about the rest of the movie?

This flick is an absurdist, over-edited, overly-chuffed pile of comic book noise that they overdosed with a layer of cornball dialog in case we didn’t get the joke the first time around.

I disliked this action comedy spoofy thing…. whatever it thinks it is. I wanted to walk out on a number of occasions and only the final act’s interesting addition to its story kept me seated. It’s not an amazing ending but its at least something – anything – to keep my interested. Something that didn’t bug the ever-loving snot out of me.

Score: 65