Zany dystopian actioner which treads that fine-line between being both a violent gore-fest and a screwball comedy (note the producer credit for The Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi). Kick-Ass was the high watermark for this sort of thing – and although this leans into similar comicbook territory, it never delivers the same emotional heft. Action-wise, it more than competes, with brutal gun-fu and weapons duels provided by fight choreographer Dawid Szatarski, protégé of Brad Allan and his game-changing work on similarly outrageous films like Kingsman. The highly trained cast deliver extra authenticity, with silat master Yayan Ruhian playing another mystical sensei to great aplomb, and star Bill Skarsgård looks lean and mean in an all-fighting lead role. As the titular ‘Boy’, he adopts the action trope of ‘say less’ to play a deaf-mute assassin, trained in the South African rainforest by Yayan to exact revenge on the country’s tyrannical dynastic rule, which sees the powerful Van Der Koy family torture and murder anyone who resists them. The Boy is buried alive, forced to push giant rocks up a hill, and gets loopy on hallucinogens – all in the pursuit of becoming an expert assassin to take out the head of the Van Der Koy family, the mad matriarch Hilda (Janssen). In shades of The Hunger Games, the family keep their subjects in check with a yearly televised event called ‘The Culling’ – sponsored by a breakfast cereal, because of reasons of satire – in which poor folk are rounded up and butchered on live television. Because of his inability to speak, the film relies on the Boy’s inner monologue, which channels a superhero from a videogame and lands somewhere close to the tone to the Batman character in the Lego movies. This forces the film into more of a comedy, even if the hit-rate isn’t always consistent. The supporting cast understand the brief; notably Andrew Koji as a loud British resistance fighter, and Stranger Things‘ Brett Gelman providing his usual brand of neuroticism.