I went into They Will Kill You with mid-tier expectations and a mild interest. At best, I was hoping for parallels to the Ready or Not films, or even the annoyance factor of The Inheritance. Instead, I got a film with parallels to the Ready or Not films, and the annoyance factor of The Inheritance.
Style Forgotten
Right off the bat, I gotta say, They Will Kill You has a fantastic opening act. The opening scene isn’t much of a hook, but it does set up the foundation for the emotional stakes of the film. A cross between a noir, a gritty revenge film, and an homage to pulp samurai flicks, They Will Kill You simultaneously drew me in, and set itself up as a very unique film. I was excited.
Then we got the second act.
The style, the panache, the sheer desire to be cool all disappeared. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they wanted a few scenes where things toned down, maybe they couldn’t balance it with the dark humor, maybe they forgot. The zoom cuts, the egregious blood sprays, the cool, confident fight choreography all goes out the window.
I think that They Will Kill You set itself up as a film that was going to be Kill Bill-esque with nonstop action and small, isolated pockets of lore and character work. Instead, the film often screeches to a halt to sit down the audience and explain. I mean, they even had really great chapter-like story inserts to explain something about this world they’d created, but that went away halfway into the movie. It would have worked if they went action-backstory insert-action the whole way.
I don’t think that this was necessarily incompetence or forgetfulness from the director. There’s plenty of style in the rest of the movie, but I think that their need to work through the plot forced the style into the back seat.
Their big action set piece takes place in a darkened dining hall with the villains darting in and out of the darkness, which forces the protagonist, played by Zazie Beetz, to light her axe on fire to see her attackers. Cool. She even gets a goofy slow-mo shot of her jumping through the air to slice a guy clear in half. Cool. But the rest of that action scene is Beetz simply hitting them in their torsos. Not a lot of gnarly beheadings or cutting off limbs or anything particularly clever.
Parallels and Philosophies
The Ready or Not films make a point to juxtaposition the haves and have-nots as a justification for their wholesale slaughter of the rich, the first film a bit better than the second. The sequel then undercuts the idea by bringing the devil subplot front and center. It made for a funny climax, but philosophically it undercut its own message by excusing the rich people’s evilness by blaming the devil. They Will Kill You falls for exactly the same mistake.
The antagonists are just random people, sometimes rich, sometimes just poor people scrubbing floors, who have been granted immortality by the devil. This means that Beetz has to kill them over and over again and run off before they can regenerate. Cool enough, but not a good metaphor for “fuck them rich people” when you have literal maids and janitors wielding knives.
The finale involves Beetz tricking the devil into gaining its power, then strips the bad guys of their immortality, kills some of them, and lets the rest go. All of the evil crap that the antagonists do ends up being simply because of the literal devil. The implication here is that it’s not that wealth and power corrupts, just the devil. It’s hard for someone to buy into your closing dialogue of “fucking rich people” if there’s no real philosophical punch justification for it in the film.
So that leads me to thinking about why this movie even exists. It wanted to be cool, but it didn’t fully commit. It wanted to villainize the rich, but doesn’t really paint wealth as the source of corruption. Maybe they just wanted to go out there and have some fun. I hope they did. But why do we need to witness their fun-having? Why does this movie exist? It doesn’t really do anything that well. It reaches, but doesn’t get there.
My initial thoughts leaned YMMV, but I don’t know if anyone would really remember this movie, especially compared to the far more entertaining Ready or Not. It’s unfortunately not even as rage-baitingly bad as The Inheritance. I don’t really have any reason why I shouldn’t just slap a BAD rating on this film.
Fuckit.
I rate They Will Kill You
BAD
I watched They Will Kill You on HBO.
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