They Will Kill You

Zazie Beetz is a woman on a mission of survival in They Will Kill You (Distributed by Warner Bros.)

They Will Kill You uses an extremely simple premise as an excuse for a few cool action scenes and gallons of blood. It traps its heroine in a single location, with a whole bunch of villains, then creates situations where she has to stab, slash, shoot and burn her way through them. It is kind of fun, for a little while, at least. However, even at a brief 89 minutes (without the end credits), it runs out of steam about halfway through. It is just the same idea, repeated many times over. The first couple of action scenes are entertaining, and Zazie Beetz is convincing as the determined protagonist, but it basically says all it needs to in the first 45 minutes or so. Its sense of humor is refreshingly goofy, yet it really only has a few jokes. It is an amusing concept that doesn’t have enough ideas to make it worth a look.

A woman shows up at a fancy Manhattan building to start work as a maid. That night, she awakens to find a man in a pig mask assaulting her. This is merely the beginning of a hellish night where she learns that this place is full of evil and she has been marked for sacrifice.

Right from the opening, it is clear They Will Kill You is going to be style over substance. It is like a cross between a comic book and a video game. The way Zazie Beetz is filmed always presents her as a badass action hero (it reminded me of Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill). So many of her character’s decisions seem as though they were made because she looks cool doing them. To be fair, that is true most of the time. That plus the copious amount of gore spilled in the first fight announce this as something not meant to be taken seriously. Her enemies are threats, but they are far more comedic than scary. These elements make it seem like this should be fun. For a bit, it is, until you realize that it only has one main gag and it renders most of the action totally pointless.

Lilith (Patricia Arquette) leads the hunt

The reason for that is the twist. Skip the next paragraph if you intend to see this and want to go in spoiler free, like I did.

Here goes. After fending off her attackers by literally cutting them apart, the main character watches as their bodies miraculously heal and they continue their pursuit. You see, they are immortal. What follows are many sequences where she cuts off limbs or blows their heads off, only for them to get up seconds later. It is amusing at first, then quickly grows monotonous. None of it matters. Even the nature of their existence is largely irrelevant to the story (though it does provide the screenplay with its climax).

END OF SPOILERS

Director/cowriter Kirill Sokolov has quality style, especially when it comes to staging action. However, They Will Kill You does not have nearly enough meat on the bone to justify itself. Its borderline slapstick humor does get some laughs, yet it is too much of the same thing to sustain it for very long. It does have the feel of a midnight movie. It could be discovered later on by people with a penchant for silly, violent, blood-soaked comedy. Maybe it will work better at home, with a group of friends joking throughout, aided by several alcoholic beverages.

2¾ out of 5

Cast:

Zazie Beetz as Asia

Myha’la as Maria

Patricia Arquette as Lilith

Heather Graham as Sharon

Tom Felton as Kevin

Directed by Kirill Sokolov

Written by Alex Litvak and Kirill Sokolov