MOVIE REVIEW – It would be easy to pitch They Will Kill You as if Sam Raimi had smashed headfirst into the world of Kill Bill. Or as another grimy, hyperactive genre mash-up wedged somewhere between the director of Drag Me to Hell and the Tarantino-Rodriguez brand of Grindhouse. Those comparisons are not completely off base, but it is better to dial back expectations right away. Because They Will Kill You is genuinely entertaining at times and knows how to flaunt its style, yet it never rises to the level of the films it so clearly wants to echo, whether in stakes or character work, and it runs out of steam in repetitive fashion well before the finale.

Zazie Beetz plays Asia Reaves, whose name already sounds like something Tarantino would scribble in the margin of a chapter heading. Asia takes a job at the strange Virgil hotel in New York, a place whose bad reputation has been lingering since the early twentieth century. It is hard to tell whether the long list of disappearances, the doors that lock from the inside, or the satanic markings smeared across the walls make the place more unsettling. Every corner of the hotel radiates the sense that something is deeply wrong, but at first Asia has no idea how far the building’s secrets go – or what kind of creatures actually live there.

First Day on the Job at the Gates of Hell

On Asia’s first night, she is greeted by the building’s caretaker, Lilith, and Patricia Arquette brings exactly the right mix of icy contempt and fake calm to make you suspicious on sight. Asia has barely had time to settle in before four pig-masked attackers come crashing at her, including the characters played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton, who stand out as leading figures in the building’s satanic inner circle. If that setup brings Ready or Not to mind, you are not far off, except there is a twist here that pushes the whole thing into even crazier territory. In the film’s best scene, Asia tears through her attackers in brutally efficient fashion, then stares in disbelief as these things simply start putting themselves back together.

Yes, the residents of the Virgil once struck a deal with the devil, and that little arrangement made them immortal. It gives Kirill Sokolov the perfect excuse to cut loose with severed limbs, flying chunks of flesh, and gleefully shameless carnage, because none of it has any real consequences anyway. At first, that is a lot of fun, because the film clearly takes pleasure in tossing body parts around, but that same idea also drains the tension out of it. Just as the Crazy 88 sequence in Kill Bill was never about realism, the problem here is not that everything is turned up too far. The problem is that after a while, the action gives off more of a numb video game loop than genuine cinematic intensity. Sokolov’s comic-book influence is obvious too, with some shots looking as if they were lifted straight out of a blood-soaked graphic novel panel.

Beetz Carries It, While the Film Scrambles to Keep Up

Comic books, video games, Tarantino, Raimi – at a certain point They Will Kill You starts to feel like an overstuffed blend desperate to cram everything inside, while forgetting it should probably build a personality of its own. Even so, the chaos works now and then, and mostly because of one person. That is not really thanks to the makeup team or the visual effects, but to Zazie Beetz. Whether she is decapitating someone in her underwear or setting an axe on fire just to make the next blow more memorable, Beetz is such a naturally convincing action lead that it becomes almost irritating how little the film fully commits to her. She also handles the emotional thread without any trouble, because Asia’s descent into hell has personal stakes as well: she wants to save her sister Maria, whom she knows is somewhere inside the Virgil. Beetz has been one of the most compelling actresses of her generation for quite a while now, and this film easily proves she could carry an entire franchise on her back.

The problem is that this probably should not be the one. At a time when so many festival titles disappear without a trace into the bottomless sludge pit of streaming libraries, it is at least understandable that this SXSW entry ended up getting a wider theatrical push through New Line and Warner. This is exactly the kind of movie that plays better with a loud crowd that laughs, cheers, and claps, because audience reaction injects extra life into a film that is otherwise pretty thin in character, theme, and storytelling. The whole thing is a noisy, blood-soaked freak-out that tries to win over the popcorn crowd while constantly reminding them of better movies. By the end, what lingers is the sense that it can be as loud, bloody, and frantic as it wants, but it is simply not inventive enough or confident enough to truly overcome its own shortcomings.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-