Zazie Beetz must be exhausted. Not only did she train for four months to play They Will Kill You’s Asia Reaves – an ex-con hacking and slashing her way through an elite New York hotel to rescue her sister Marie (Myha’la) – she also had to carry the entire damn film on her shoulders. Kirill Sokolov’s action-horror-comedy leans its entire body weight onto her magnetism. Practically every other shot is a crash zoom into her features, either snarled up or quieted with killer focus, wielding a blade, a fire axe set on fire, or a decapitated pig’s head possessed by Beelzebub.
Beetz, via FX’s Atlanta or Deadpool 2 (2018), has steadily built up a portfolio of pleasingly jagged-edged women – bitingly funny, tender-hearted, uncompromising. Asia’s all those qualities, plus a little of John McClane and his (literally) barefoot resilience and The Bride, of Kill Bill fame, and her single-minded fixation. She’s brilliant.
The only problem with They Will Kill You is that it’s confused iconography with substance. It operates under the assumption that if it creates enough of a mystique around its protagonist – and there’s every trick in the book here, to the point it feels as if someone’s playing paddle ball with the camera – then everything else will fall neatly in line.
Only Sokolov, who co-wrote his script with Alex Litvak, has provided Asia with little more than a bloodied dollhouse to romp around in. His primary location, The Virgil, might as well be part of the Ready or Not franchise (one of those movies was only released last week). It’s a satanic getaway in which inhabitants are granted immortality in return for human sacrifice, plucked from the city’s population of vulnerable women, most of them minorities, and lured in by the promise of work and board.
The one quirk to this “eat the rich” offering is that, because they cannot die, we’ll watch Asia dismember this cabal – three of them played by Heather Graham, Tom Felton, and Patricia Arquette, the latter doing what would be a half-decent Newfoundland accent if it weren’t actually meant to be Irish – only for their limbs to reattach and their necks to sprout new heads.
Here, They Will Kill You does feature some charming, Sam Raimi-esque practical gore effects. A detached eyeball scoots around the place like a gristly worm. Yet the fact its villains are unable to die eventually works against the film, with Asia trapped in a cycle of chopping up the same five or so people again and again.
There’s little more to the antagonists beyond their faux-presentation of reasonableness (“if you get to know us, we’re really nice people,” one whines), and little more to the hero beyond her guilt of having abandoned her sister to the whims of their abusive father (10 years ago, she shot him in self-defence and fled the scene, eventually ending up in prison for it).
Even the Virgil feels half-realised as a location. There’s a notion vocalised early on that Asia will have to methodically work her way down the floors of the hotel, The Raid (2011) style, with each representative of a deadly sin. She manages “lust”, then “gluttony”, before the film realises “envy” and “pride” require an abstract approach and the idea is swiftly abandoned. Why work that hard when you can instead lay it all at your star’s feet?
Dir: Kirill Sokolov. Starring: Zazie Beetz, Myha’La, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, Patricia Arquette. Cert 15, 94 minutes.
‘They Will Kill You’ is in cinemas from 27 March
