It’s shocking to consider that there was a time not that long ago when this film and Ready or Not 2 were coming out on the same weekend, instead of a week apart, which is what has happened. Not only do they both feature attractive young female actors being hunted down for sport by members of a Satanic cult, but the actors playing the hunters are known-quantity performers who don’t normally appear in films that are this high profile, at least not any more.
In They Will Kill You, we have the likes of Harry Potter’s Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and Patricia Arquette—all fine actors—as employees or guests of the exclusive Virgil hotel, which hides a giant secret, namely that every one inside is out to murder a sacrificial human brought in under the guise of being a member of the service staff. In this case, that person is Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz), an ex-convict looking for her break and, it turns out, her missing sister, Maria (Myha’la).
Felton and Graham play rich residents, while Arquette plays the Irish-born superintendent of the Virgil and one of the leaders of the cult trying to capture Asia and feed her to…something. Some of the action gets pretty graphic, but what’s interesting about this version of the age-old plot is that these Satanists can’t be killed, even if they lose a limb or an eyeball (a sequence involving someone’s plucked-out eye moving through the vents in the hotel, looking for Asia, is pretty hilarious). As long as they have their names written on a particular cursed object, they won’t die; but rest assured, their dark lord can erase their names whenever he feels like it, leaving them eager to please and feed him on schedule.
Produced by Andy and Barbara Muschietti (the It movies; Mama) and directed by Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov (2018’s Why Don’t You Just Die!), making his English-language debut, They Will Kill You is a lot of mid-level violence, plot that doesn’t really go anywhere satisfying or original, and dark humor that isn’t particularly funny. The always game Beetz is interesting just because she’s such a natural-born badass, but the screenplay gives her very little to do once the action gets going. And while Asia makes the point that she learned to defend herself in prison, when you see the fighting skills she has, I don’t think something that well coordinated was learned behind bars.
There’s a certain brazen quality to the whole affair that I appreciated to a degree, but enthusiasm and good intention don’t always result in an exceptional piece of filmmaking. Even when Asia does locate her sister, it’s not difficult to predict how that reunion is going to go. By the way, the inclusion of an estranged sister is yet another similarity to Ready or Not 2…it’s kind of the whole point of that movie. And that’s one too many parallel plots for me. Despite a few decent fight sequences, They Will Kill You is a sizable disappointment.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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