Joel on Film

At one point in They Will Kill You, our strong-willed protagonist wields a flaming ax with which to defend herself from an oncoming horde of faceless goons. It’s a wholly ridiculous moment, but it certainly belongs in this wholly ridiculous movie, which unfortunately doesn’t go far enough in acknowledging its own ridiculousness. A big reason for that, by the way, has to do with a major plot development which, to reveal it, would require a significant “spoiler alert” at the beginning of this review: Here, for whatever it’s worth, is that alert.

It’s sort of an ingenious move on the parts of Kirill Sokolov (who also directed) and Alex Litvak to have penned a story that relies so heavily upon this particular plot development, because it makes this movie quite difficult to review. On one hand, the plot point happens within 20 minutes of the start of the movie and, appreciably, was not revealed in a trailer campaign that drew a small amount of criticism for seeming to reveal the entire story. It’s a good thing, obviously, to go into a movie with one set of expectations, only to have them subverted because we had those expectations in the first place.

On the other hand, it rather locks the writer into a certain and precarious position of deciding how to handle the information that comes as a result of that revelation when there is really no major twist or further subversion of those expectations for the rest of the movie’s running time. There are a few more surprises to be found in the climax, to be sure, but none of them carries the entire weight of the film’s One Big Surprise that actually turns out to be the film’s entire premise. There is also the fact that the One Big Surprise is pretty clever at first, only to be driven into the ground by repetition.

The strong-willed protagonist, who will inevitably wield the flaming ax, is Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz), who has just been released from prison and is seeking employment under an assumed name. As we learn in the prologue, she committed murder (a fully justified one, to be fair) and went on the run, abandoning her younger sister Maria (Myha’la) in the process. Ten years later, she gets a job at a vast but dilapidated hotel run by Lilly (Patricia Arquette via a vaguely Irish accent), who hires her onto the help staff but fails to inform her of the Satanic blood rite upon which the entire building was established.

Yes, this is another movie in which an intrepid heroine is hunted by henchmen in hock to the inhabitant of hell—the second in as many weeks, in fact, although that’s just an accident of timing. That, though, isn’t the One Big Surprise of the movie’s plot. In this case, the surprise is that patrons—with the two most recognizable ones played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton—and staff of the hotel literally made a deal with the devil, one effect of which was they became immortal and, therefore, invulnerable.

There is some cleverness in the way the movie personifies those qualities, because it means characters can suffer stabbings, shotgun blasts, decapitations, and full cranial pulverization and, after a short pause, pop right back up again while whatever injury heals itself. It’s a gross effect, in other words, executed with expert efficiency in combining practical makeup prosthetics and sly digital manipulation. As for the action set pieces around those effects, it’s just a repetitive slew of sequences in which Asia fights off hordes of the same attackers, using the same choreography in every sequence.

The plot has Asia realizing that her sister is somewhere in this building, and the screenplay manages a bit of poignancy in this relationship once they’re reunited. There is also the matter of the final big surprise here, which involves the nature of the Big Bad in charge of the hotel and those who reside within it, but They Will Kill You is such a shallow exercise in fight scenes and gross-out effects that it barely makes an impression.

Rating: ** (out of ****)