Boy Kills World: Welcome to the Hunger Games – if no one was holding back

Welcome to The Hunger Games, if no one was holding back. Boy Kills World drops us into a fascist dystopia where similar forms of televised bloodsport dictate the social order. These keep the citizens sated and slavering, when they’re not the unfortunate ones who’ve been plucked for knockabout sacrifice – the victims specially chosen so that a family of despots called the van der Koys can hold undisputed sway.

The world-building for this berserk odyssey is accomplished in a frenetic first few minutes you may find hard to keep up with: it’s as if the film kicks off with its own trailer. We learn that Bill Skarsgård’s character, a ludicrously ripped deaf-mute known only as “Boy”, watched his mother and sister gunned down, then escaped into the jungle; we zip through his adolescence being trained in martial arts by a helpful shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian); and we know he’s coming back for revenge.

The film’s fetish for a red-and-yellow palette may put you in mind of Kill Bill, but there are a zillion other reference points it blithely absorbs, from Oldboy to Scott Pilgrim and, inevitably, Deadpool.

Somehow, the knowing obnoxiousness of the tone lands the right way up here: it’s less shiny or smug than inventively, gaudily weird. First-time director Moritz Mohr, who persuaded Sam Raimi to lend his producing clout, throws the kitchen sink at it: the film has a body count in the high dozens, and relentless passages of slickly cartoonish action choreography. Heads are caved in, hands pulled off, but all in a spirit of daft excess.

Mohr isn’t content to let his camera sit back and watch the stunt performers earn their pay. It swoops and glides all over the place, as if it can’t resist joining in. Some may find the effect frazzling, but the film’s hyperactive form is certainly of a piece with its video-game sensibility – it just won’t quit.

Boy’s inner monologue is performed by the gravelly Bob’s Burgers voice actor H. Jon Benjamin. The combination is key: Skarsgård’s incongruous boyish innocence, with that Cupid’s bow of his fixed in place, goes a long way towards making the character a strangely endearing cipher (rather more so than John Wick). Giving a poised silent-movie-idol performance in the middle of this OTT splatterfest is no mean feat.

Allies come to Boy’s side, including the joshing spectre of his dead sister, and a resistance fighter called Basho who has no idea he’s deaf, played with intense gusto and a cockney accent by the rising British star Andrew Koji. He’s not the only person in the supporting cast to score: as van der Koy siblings who hate each other as much as they revel in notoriety, a machine-gun-toting Michelle Dockery and Fleabag’s Brett Gelman have heaps of diabolical fun.

The film risks taking itself too seriously only in the last act, unveiling an unguessable twist which reshuffles the deck of villains, but then waxing sentimental. It’s altogether preferable when Basho’s massive sidekick Benny (Isaiah Mustafa) is speaking a torrent of gibberish, and the baffled Boy simply nods along and pretends to get the plan. The film is pushy and zany and maybe won’t stand a rewatch, but maybe it will. The game physicality of it won me over.

18 cert, 110 min. In cinemas now