I’m cool, I’m handsome: I’m Boy Kills World

Look, but what will have happened? Well, it will be a month, at most a month and a half.
He had just left Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s directorial debut, and the boss – aware of my visceral and historicized hatred towards the actor – had sent me on a mission to review the film. And it was on that occasion that I discovered, not without a certain amount of surprisewhich in here, among the readers, is full of people who are crazy about the intern’s vanity projects The Newsroom.
Everyone says: “oh well, but if you hate it so much then it’s not worth it, the film is beautiful and you didn’t understand it, you’re consumed with envy, look, that guy really took three taekwondo lessons”.
Then he goes out Boy Kills World and the boss sends me home a little pizzino. He sent it to me via Uber Eats, which in these cases is very convenient.
I open it.
It’s a four cheese pizzino.
Inside it says:

“Hello Casanova! If you don’t follow suit Boy Kills World by Sunday evening I will book your holidays in Greece, in Mykonos, in a two-star hotel, in the room, you and him alone. Yes, this is Dev Patel. To show you I’m not joking, here’s a reproduction of the Mona Lisa made from Dev Patel’s beard hair.”

I remained there – with this four-cheese pizza in my hand, all full of hair from Dev’s well-groomed beard.
Until I recovered from the disgust, I took a look at the soundtrack of Boy Kills Worldand then exploded seraphicly into a: “Wow, what a theme song!”

Yes, in addition to the score – if you ask me a little anonymous or maybe, who knows, beautiful! (we will never know, hidden as it is by too many other thousand production elements of the film), signed by Ludvig Forssell, former composer of Death Stranding for Kojima Production, there are a few pieces by the nice El Michels Affair, who only a few years ago delighted us with an entire album dedicated to an “analog” reinterpretation of Wu Tang. In short, it’s not a bad discovery, right? I mean, it made me feel good about the film. But then I saw the film, and at the end of the viewing I thought:

“Damn, how much does the Boss know? This Nanni Cobretti is a real big guy, eh? First he shows me Money Man and then this Boy Kills World, which is practically the exact same thing… But what does it really mean to me? What does he want to teach me, in his infinite wisdom? That my partial and uncertain benevolence towards this last film is only the result of the hatred I feel towards poor Dev? Or maybe he wants to think bigger… Maybe he wants to get me to think about the fact that this stuff of making films in which the stunt coordinator, the action and fight designer, is basically more important than the director or any other element of the film , is a new trend in the cinema of beating that has established itself in that liminal territory between under and overground. What is the difference between a 2023/4 movie that has Jordan Peele’s name behind it, posthumously, and one in which Sam Raimi appears among the producers? Perhaps the Boss, in his infinite wisdom, wanted to suggest to me that the revolution carried out by Chad Stahelski ended up making rom-coms with Gosling and Blunt and not making stuff like the first Extraction?”

.
How many doubts. What paranoia, what discomfort.
But above all why Monkey Man is the same and Boy Kills World?

Monkey Man: Sharlto Copley shouts things into a microphone

Why:
1) they are two films that basically tell the same story: a child witnesses the death of a member of his family at the hands of the film’s villain and decides to dedicate his entire life to Vengeance with a capital V.
2) Because they are two films which, even if they have very different tones from each other, do not know exactly which tone to choose EVER and end up remaining in that indecipherable limbo in which farce and tragedy, comedy a pound per kilo and a blind and useless seriousness. In short, a little here and a little there, but never in the center, never a balance.
3) Because they are two films that focus on the dedication (in favor of the camera but off set) of the lead actor who, for the occasion, has built a fearsome physique. And then they found a publicist who runs around like a madman saying that all those stunts are done by him himself, that there’s no joke here, eh?
4) Because they are two films that focus entirely on the staging of the fights, which they have in The Raid the tutelary deity but who are also aware that they cannot reach that high, so in the end they find themselves remembering a bit the confusion of Bourne Identity or having to make fake sequence shots with cuts that perhaps would like to be a little less rough.
Finally, 5) Because they are two films that undermine the concept of Politique des Auteurs applied to modern action: how much does direction weigh in these cases? Is it still the director who decides something, anything, or is it the stunt coordinator (in this case Mr. Dawid Szatarski) who imposes his vision on the film?

Watching the film (the one in the left hand is actually a carrot)

From a certain point of view this Boy Kills World it is, for me, a tad better than Monkey Man. And that certain point of view is precisely the one that interests us most, that of the fighting. Self Monkey Man aimed – without fear of accusations of plagiarism – at John Wick, there’s a little more imagination here and it seems to me that the action develops in a more organic (if you prefer, less clumsy) way than its direct competitor. Bill Skarsgård took his time in anticipation of the (announced flop?) remake of The Ravento become a fucking Greek statue, but then there’s Yayan Ruhian who gives the film a final three-way duel which, in addition to directly quoting the ending of The Raidobjectively made me emotional.
Also noteworthy in the coveted fight was an excellent Andrew Koji and the phenomenal body double by Jessica Rothe.

This is when things go well

From another point of view, however, Boy Kills World It’s really a mess. Worst than Monkey Man! And that other point of view is everything else. Why Boy Kills World it seems like a film created in the mid-nineties, after Tarantino’s Copernican revolution, in which everything that is over the top is “pulp”. Without this word we really make sense. Boy Kills World he thinks he’s cool and in step with the times because he quotes the language of videogames and crazy comics, because he fills (in a completely useless way) the screenplay with over the top characters. Over the top because they are dressed like crazy clowns, nothing more, eh?
Because it tries to make you passionate about a story in which, however, you don’t feel a shred of interest in anyone.
Zero.
In addition to the aforementioned Sharlto Copley who does what he knows how to do (well), in addition to the aforementioned Jessica Rothe, who looks like Kraft Punk fromEric Andre Show, there’s Famke Janssen who acts like a hysterical lunatic, Michelle Dockery who thinks she’s good, and even Brett Gelman who tries to make people laugh. All this mixed with lots of other material that remains almost unused:
Deaf and mute Skarsgård, a ghost sister disguised as a ninja butterfly, a giant pineapple and some puppets that seem like ideas created by those who occupied the DAMS classrooms at the end of the nineties saying: “But why don’t you make us study Matrix instead of Carmine Gallone?”.
In short, a little too much?

Bottom line: if you’re here for the beating, I feel like saying that Boy Kills World is quite enjoyable. The rest, unfortunately, is to be thrown away.
But at least there’s no Dev Patel, that’s it.

DVD odds:

“Boy Kills World > Monkey Man”
Casanova Wong Kar-Wai, i400calci.com

>> IMDb |Trailer