This week on Wanton Destruction in the Civilized Era Theatre is They Will Kill You (now on HBO Max), a little of the ol’ ultraviolence that has us feeling divided, perhaps in half, maybe even by a flaming ax. Zazie Beetz shows significant charisma as the anchor of this revenge/rescue tale directed with more style than sense by Kirill Sokolov. The trailer famously (or not?) claimed it couldn’t show us the violent stuff for obvious reasons, and, yes, those are good reasons. Few films are violenter than this movie, which is trying to be the violentest bunch of violence you’ve seen all year. How compelling that is for everyone — filmmakers and audience alike — is the question.
The Gist: Night: Dark? Yeah. Stormy? A bit. Asia Reeves (Beetz) and her little sister Maria (Orefile Moloi) are on the run from their abusive father who catches up with them, but Asia puts a bullet in him and runs off leaving him bleeding, but not dead, and in an ambulance with little Maria. Next thing we know it’s 10 years later and Asia’s out of prison but flashing back to prison so we can see what a badass she’s become: someone who brawls like an alleycat with MMA skills and can take a shiv to the gut like it ain’t no thing. No lousy perforated bowel is gonna stop this bad, bad lady.
Asia has taken a job as a maid at The Virgil, a New York City high-rise that’s a century old and gives off vibes like its residents are the Ancient Ones. The truth is worse than measly ol’ Cthulhu: Rich elitist a-holes live there. Lilith (Patricia Arquette) manages the building and its lower-decks staff and the residents are people who ooze blecch in a generic way, like fake-smiley cosmetics mogul Sharon (Heather Graham) and Kevin (Tom Felton), who, in one of the film’s most nauseating flourishes, wears loafers with no socks. The mannerisms of Lilith’s husband Ray (Paterson Joseph) tells us he isn’t like the others, signaling his role as a pending Plot Device, perhaps. We know nothing about these people except that they probably need to be devoured by their socioeconomic “lessers.”
Well, we soon know a hard fact about ’em, though: They’re Satanists. That information makes itself known as Asia hasn’t even reached her first REM cycle. Masked, hooded figures bust into her room, and they ain’t got cookies and a bottle of welcome wine. She’s ready, though. She may be in her undies, but she’s got a — warning, incoming highly technical term — swordchete and she knows how to decapitate a MFer with it. But lopping off a limb or impaling major organs doesn’t always, y’know, cut it (no spoilers; no apologies for puns), which means everyone in this sitch got more than they bargained for. At this point we learn that Asia knows Maria (now played by Myha’la) is working at The Virgil and that the residents attain significant benefits by making ritual sacrifices to Old Scratch. It happens? Yeah. It happens.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, the characters in this movie notably have the same blood pressure issues as those who taste Lone Wolf’s sword in the Lone Wolf and Cub films. Otherwise, They Will Kill You is a crass Kill Bill knockoff with shades of the Ready or Not movies and other eat-the-rich fantasies.
Performance Worth Watching: Beetz boasts a magnetic presence as an action star (doubling as a horror-flick final girl here), and she’s game for the voluminous arterial spray, but far better than this paper-thin screenplay.
Sex And Skin: A brief shot of a Caligulan orgy in the name of Beelzebub.
Our Take: Very unholy rich people murdering their perceived lessers for personal gain? That’s a METAPHOR, ya dummies! A METAPHOR in which Satan is the generic representation for greed; a METAPHOR covered in plasma, brains, diarrhea and miscellaneous stringy oozy splatterings; a METAPHOR with so many limbs chopped off it ceases to be a METAPHOR and becomes a dull day of work at the abattoir.
Sokolov’s goal here is noble (especially for those of us weary of franchise storytelling and high-concept convolution): minimum story, maximum direction. The latter is impressive, and impressively unoriginal, a conglomeration of Tarantino tones and John Wick gestures in which wannabe-iconic shots are destined to become memes and set pieces are overcooked look-ma-I’m-a-DIRECTOR displays of flashy camera movement, slo-mo, and stylized violence. The film’s deranged sense of humor feints at saving it from being memory-holed — a bit with a crawling eyeball, optic nerve dragging behind it, is kinda awesome, a gnarly, seemingly practical effect — but when Sokolov hits on a cool idea, like the flaming-ax bit heavily teased in the trailer, he tends to dead-horse it until it becomes wearisome.
As for the minimal story? Well, it falls short of the Empathy Threshold established by John Wick’s dog. It’s impressive how They Will Kill You avoids the kind of character detail that might make audiences feel emotionally invested in a single damn thing happening here. Take the tossed-off mention that Maria’s shitty father died of cancer while she was locked up. It inspires a shrug of a hint of a complicated emotion from her, then the film moves on to the more pressing matter on hand, the bloodshed. If we can’t sense the pain of loss and a troubled past, how will we ever sense the pain of getting your head blown off with a shotgun?
Our Call: All this violence just leaves us feeling numb. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
