2026 | rated R | starring Zazie Beetz, Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, Tom Felton |directed by Kirill Sokolov | 1 hr 34 mins | 2 out of 5 stars |
It’s rare for a movie to be made up of so many parts that I love and not hit like this one does. The pieces are there but they don’t fit. The lights are on (and flashing) but nobody is home. It’s all style over substance. Zazie Beetz steps into the role of the one-woman army as Asia Reaves, an out of work woman who was separated from her sister (Myha’la) years ago takes a job as a maid at an exclusive New York hotel only to discover that the new maid is part of a ritual sacrifice by a satanic family that runs the hotel.
Coming literally one week after Ready or Not 2, Kirill Sokolov’s They Will Kill You is poised to pick up the slack where that movie didn’t quite live up to its predecessor. Instead, it runs in the opposite direction making RON2 look better by comparison, the same way the clunkiness and lack of wit or invention in The Hunt made Ready or Not look so slick the last time these people-hunting movies had a stand-off. Another satanic cult chasing down a tough final girl set for human sacrifice.
There is no meat on the bone here and it starts with Asia. While Beetz is more than capable in the action role (we knew that from Deadpool 2), this is akin to a silent video game protagonist of a character and the movie a game that advances through different levels (aka rooms in the hotel). She fights, screams, shoots, jumps in slow motion and fights with fire. Asia runs from floor to floor here with almost no challenge, easily dispensing with her pursuers without much of a sweat. In making Asia basically invincible Sokolov has fundamentally misunderstood the one-man-army power fantasy movie. These men are capable and skilled, but John McClaine, John Wick and various Liam Neeson tough guys are also vulnerable and human. They are beaten, bloodied and knocked down before they triumph. The same is true, if not more so for Uma Thurman’s The Bride in the movie that They Will Kill You is most attempting to emulate, Kill Bill. But again, not with the nuance, vulnerability and personality of The Bride. This is just that movie’s Crazy 88 fight stretched to feature length. It’s more numbing and dull than awesome. And this movie aggressively wants you to think it’s awesome.
TWKY is unoriginal in premise, but also in execution. The story is put together as a patchwork of other influences, from The Raid to Sam Raimi, Quinten Tarantino and Park Chan-Wook and every movie I’ve already mentioned here, there isn’t a moment here that doesn’t feel like a deliberate homage to something else. Even when it comes to life a bit in a finale centered around a somewhat inspired visual effect as our Final Boss, it still feels derivative. Even then, it’s kills have no impact when everyone is a superhuman and the story is struggling with its own mythology to wrap this thing up in a bow. Apparently, the devil and his cohorts are very much sticklers for semantics.
They Will Kill You is quirky for the sake of it, gory for the sake of it and sprays geysers of blood in a way that suggests its more influenced by Tarantino than Sword of Vengeance and the samurai movies that influenced Tarantino. The copies are making copies and they are increasingly faded. It’s more video game than movie and the main character is running on a cheat code of infinite health.