Mehnificent

Let’s talk about Boy Kills World—or, more precisely, let’s talk about a movie that doesn’t so much arrive as come crashing through your door, boots muddy, eyes wild, trailing the scent of a thousand better revenge flicks but insistently upbeat about its own nonsensical mayhem. Moritz Mohr, with the zeal of a film school grad who snorted every frame of John Wick and then washed it down with an energy drink, seems thrilled—no, positively giddy—to show us just how many ways he can make Bill Skarsgård break bodies in electric-neon slow motion. You don’t so much watch Boy Kills World as survive it, battered by waves of choreographed carnage, tongue-in-cheek nonsense, and so much color-grading you start craving sunglasses.

Let’s be honest: “The Vault” wants to be your next favorite heist movie, but it can’t even manage to lift your pulse. Directed by Jaume Balagueró, this Spanish exercise in genre mimicry gathers up all the usual suspects—plucky prodigy, world-weary ringleader, hacker-by-numbers—and puts them through a series of motions so familiar, you could swear you’ve wandered into a bank robbery rehearsal dinner.

Let’s lay the cards on the table: when a film’s opening proposition is “Jason Statham fights a giant prehistoric shark—again,” you’d best suspend seriousness at the door. The first movie, that improbable waterlogged delight, understood this bargain: it wore its teeth with a wink, tipping its hat to every Jaws-obsessed twelve-year-old (and the ones lurking in every adult). So, of course, Hollywood—in its infinite wisdom—gives us the sequel, the bigger, dumber, and, oh yes, shoddier Meg 2: The Trench. It’s customary. It’s almost a civic obligation. Haven’t we earned our right to a shit sequel?

Let’s start where the air gets thin and the coliseum fills with water: be honest—did you ever expect Ridley Scott, the master of “muscular history,” to burst gladiatorial combat wide open with the introduction of actual sharks? Gladiator II, for all its sweat-drenched howls of reverence toward the original, is less Maximus’s solemn march to myth than a glittering, full-throttle fever dream—part sequel, part spectacle, and not altogether sure which side it wants to fight for.

You sit down with a movie like Dominique the way you’d order a late-night plate of bar wings at a dive bar: you know what you’re in for, and all you’re hoping is that it brings enough heat to be worth gnawing on. As action programmers go, this one checks all the boxes out of sheer necessity rather than finesse. We’re basically in the realm of “Die Hard by way of Bogotá,” or maybe, more honestly, as if John Wick lost her passport and was forced to improvise with whatever household hardware happened to be lying around—a Ukrainian takeout menu, heavy on grit, low on budget, zestily unconcerned with nutrition.

Where does one even begin with a movie like this—a cinematic bag of potato chips that’s all salt, no flavor, and leaves you wondering why you even opened it? “Chief of Station” (2024)—let’s just pause and savor those quotation marks, because any film so adamant about being a “gem” should take a long, honest look in the mirror—stars the usually capable Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy, a man who, judging by his performance, seems to have signed on before reading anything past “Action/Thriller” at the top of the script.