In Kirill Sokolov’s “They Will Kill You,” a sword-wielding Zazie Beetz infiltrates a satanic cult housed in a luxury hotel, with the aim of rescuing one of its maids from becoming a human sacrifice. The pieces are all in place for a viciously enjoyable midnight action romp, which the film most certainly is when the bloodshed first begins. However, the twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.
A dramatic, rain-soaked prologue sees the battered Asia Reaves (Beetz) escaping her abusive father, only to leave her adolescent sister behind. A decade later, we find our heroine posing as a newly-hired maid — still amidst a downpour, connecting the two scenes before we know exactly how — when she arrives at the old Manhattan hotel known as The Virgil, a name recalling the Roman poet who, in Dante’s “Inferno,” becomes a guide to Hell. However, “They Will Kill You” is hardly subtle about its setting, so the hotel’s walls are also adorned in overtly satanic décor.
Welcomed by mysterious manager Lily (Patricia Arquette, performing with a distractingly shaky Irish accent), Asia’s first night takes a turn when cultists dressed in baggy raincoats and pig masks infiltrate her hotel room, only for her to shock them with a machete and a litany of other weapons, as crash-zooms, blood sprays and a spaghetti Western-inspired score come lashing to the fore. It’s one heck of an introduction. However, it grows both more surprising and immediately more disappointing when a supernatural element of its premise is revealed: the slashed off limbs and other carnage are immediately, magically undone, with body parts snapping and writhing back into place, hinting at the nature of these villains’ deal with the devil. This wrinkle makes thematic sense in theory, but it also immediately rips the air out of room the next time Asia goes on a blood-soaked rampage to find and rescue her sister (played as an adult by Myha’la).
What exactly is Asia’s plan, and where must she go to achieve it? Those are good questions, but the hotel’s larger geography is never really laid out, and the action scenes — although filled with cartoonish violence — never seem to have any objective beyond the carnage itself. Add to this the fact that each hack, slash and gunshot loses its sting, thanks to the villains’ temporary immortality, and what you’re left with is a series of ideas for energetic action moments, strung together with little connective tissue.
For better or worse, Sokolov wears his influences on his sleeve, chief among them Timur Bekmambetov and Quentin Tarantino (to whom his last feature “Why Don’t You Just Die!” drew numerous comparisons). However, where Tarantino’s revenge classic “Kill Bill” drew from deeper cuts and sublimated them into something new — not to mention, something dramatically affecting — Sokolov trades in emotional broad strokes and largely borrows the familiar imagery of millennial touchstones and IMDb fan favorites like Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy.” There are hints of other, slightly older influences too (Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” films) among some more recent global hits, like those by Telugu sensation S.S. Rajamouli. But these spare parts only serve to highlight the disconnected nature of the director’s inspirations. In “They Will Kill You,” eye-catching compositions exist in complete isolation, untethered from larger meaning. Each repetitive action beat takes on only the most superficial appearance of something you might pump your fist to alongside Pavlovian needle drops, and their totality is deeply unsatisfying.
Tarantino’s work looms largest over Sokolov, but in that vein, he at least does a few things differently. For one thing, his barefooted heroine is presented less fetishistically, and more in the vein of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” wherein exposed soles become a vulnerability. Sokolov also wields a much shorter lens, warping and exaggerating space with each swinging motion, while his cast moves in almost dance-like fashion. There’s a different version of this film — not one that exists, but one that can be imagined — where the action choreography is cut together with more purpose, and dictated by the actors’ purposeful rhythms. There’s a lot of crawling through vents and tight spaces that takes on a momentous quality too, and an especially innovative sequence reminiscent of, of all things, the millennial touchstone “Toy Story 3,” in which Asia is chased by a disembodied, animatronic eye, as its perspective is fed back to its host, à la Mrs. Potato Head.
These sort of ludicrous, laugh-out-loud concepts prevent “They Will Kill You” from being a total bust, but for a film steeped in righteous vengeance to actually work, it requires some semblance of humanity too. All we end up learning about Asia is that she learned to fight in prison and wants to make good on her one mistake (abandoning Maria). Meanwhile, the movie’s villains — played by recognizable faces, among them Heather Graham and Tom Felton — get pretty much zero by way of personality, or even superficial nastiness, making Asia’s reprisals a whole lot less entertaining. The movie does attempt to gesture at class and race as thematic underpinnings (the maids trapped in The Virgil are mostly non-white, while the villains are rich Caucasians), but like the story and action at large, these go pretty much nowhere, and feel like obligatory symbols.
Beetz, for her part, makes for a wonderfully committed blood-soaked heroine sure to inspire at least a handful of Halloween outfits. However, there are seldom times when the movie’s frenetic action actually translates into the kind of rousing, “Fuck yeah!” crowd moments for which the film is clearly aiming. The righteousness of on-screen vengeance is rooted in deserved comeuppance, but nothing in “They Will Kill You” is allowed moral dimensions — simple or otherwise — since nothing is known about who’s doing the ass-kicking, or who’s ass is being kicked. Similarly, the movie’s just desserts are completely bland, since they’re constantly robbed of real stakes when folks being dismembered can just walk it off and try again. And while you might be tempted to think this is all building to a climax where this mercifully isn’t the case, sadly, you’d be mistaken. By the end, the only thing killed is your patience.
