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They Will Kill You movie review: The Zazie Beetz film is all blood and gore
They Will Kill You movie review: Kirill Sokolov can be very polished and slick in mounting the action pieces, and some of these are stunning. However, there is a difference between there will be blood, and blood will be there.
They Will Kill You movie review: Very polished and charismatic actors make up the body count in They Will Kill You.
They Will Kill You movie review: “When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs.”
That’s the longest — and clearly, it thinks, the deepest — sentence They Will Kill You has in its vocabulary, and that too is a quote from the 16th-century Italian goldsmith-sculptor-author Benvenuto Cellini.
But, for all that self-aggrandising pretentiousness, the devil, who at least has a sense of devilry about him, is hardly likely to be amused – forget laughing.
A pastiche of Quentin Tarantino, minus that director’s sharp dialogue and incisive score, this film directed by Kirill Sokolov is blood and bore. A little more of the red stuff squirting out of body parts, and Satan himself may have choked.
As for “the poor giving to the rich”, or the Whites giving it to the Blacks (which is one way of looking at it), They Will Kill You is not very choosy once the bloodletting starts.
The socialist pretensions, such as they are, end literally on the first floor, where the help lives (in the other clear inspiration for the film, Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer). The setting is an uber-luxe apartment building in Manhattan, with the uber-smug name of ‘Virgil’ and with an endless demand for “house maids”. No time is lost establishing exactly why – and after that, it is all about killing or getting killed, even when the killed are never really killed.
It’s a shame because some very polished and charismatic actors make up the body count here, including Zazie Beetz (playing the protagonist, Asia Reaves), Myha’la of Industry TV show fame (playing Asia’s sister Maria), Patricia Arquette (who is Lily, the Superintendent of the apartment building from hell), as well as Heather Graham and Tom Felton (as Lily’s bloodthirsty renters).
Watch They Will Kill You trailer here:
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Russian writer-director Sokolov can be very polished and slick in mounting the action pieces, and some of these are stunning. However, there is a difference between there will be blood, and blood will be there.
One example of how Sokolov overplays his hand is in the very nifty trick of an eyeball detached from the body trailing Asia up and down the apartment building, including using the tissue still attached to it to vault up an elevator shaft. It looks better than it sounds – till it doesn’t.
The furious crawling on all fours along vents by Asia and the others, chasing each other, is also very funny at first – till it isn’t.
The lack of originality is most evident when a pighead turns up on a stick. And no one among the surprised lot even mentions Lord of the Flies.
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They Will Kill You movie director: Kirill Sokolov
They Will Kill You movie cast: Zazie Beetz, Myha’la, Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, Tom Felton, Paterson Joseph
They Will Kill You movie rating: 1.5 stars
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