Modeled after Quentin Tarantino films, blaxploitation, and kung fu movies, Kirill Sokolov’s “They Will Kill You” is a mixtape of an action thriller that narratively and stylistically never quite comes together. Its lack of visual cohesion and bizarre finale get in the way of enjoying the whirlwind of fists, bullets, fantastical fights, and a sword with katana-like powers of cutting bodies in half. No one can accuse this film of becoming boring, but its over-stuffed narrative never quite delivers on its promising start.
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After escaping an abusive father and a stint in prison, Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) arrives at The Virgil, a posh art deco building in New York City, for a new job. She briefly interviews with Lily (Patricia Arquette), a stern-faced boss, who leads her past some of the well-heeled clientele into the cleaners’ quarters to settle in for the night. In the early am hours, Asia finds herself under attack from masked and cloaked assailants who are impervious to injury, revealing the building’s true identity as a Satanic temple and that she had been invited to work as a guise to sacrifice her. Satanic worshippers be damned, Asia is determined to find her long-lost sister Maria (Myha’la), unleashing a world of gory injuries, gunshot wounds, and head-splitting sword slashes on all who stand in her way.
A lot is going on in “They Will Kill You,” possibly even too much. Co-written by Alex Litvak and Sokolov, there’s a sense that they were inspired by Tarantino’s reference-heavy, signature style, drawing on various movies—from the grindhouse to the classics—and folding them into their own. That’s evident here as well. The opening is reminiscent of “Suspiria,” following our main character through the rain as they arrive at an ornate but ominous-looking building full of villains. The masked costumes look like a riff on Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” but swap out the Venetian masks for a leather-like pig mask.
But Sokolov’s English-language debut doesn’t always stick with the various elements he’s pulling into the film. It introduces wild zooms and creative action scenes à la “Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2,” but it’s not always consistent, so that energy disappears again for much of the runtime, skipping other action scenes altogether. There are some interesting ideas in the script that are brought up initially but then dropped rather than explored. For example, at one point, a character explains that The Virgil has different floors for different vices. Still, the film only shows a split-second shot of an orgy and the kill-happy group trying to complete a ritual sacrifice. We could have found some uses for gluttony and sloth, I’m sure of it. While the immortal rich make for easy villains, what of it? There’s nothing there beyond rich stock characters who can get away with setting up a cult in midtown Manhattan. It’s noticeable that The Virgil’s cleaners are Black and brown women, except one white woman who eagerly sacrifices herself to the cause. Perhaps it’s a commentary on the working class who accept poor treatment in return for scraps, but the film moves from one fight to another.
However uneven the script, the cast is the film’s strongest feature. Beetz is an excellent action hero, channeling the cool bravado of Pam Grier as she slices, impales, and beats an endless swarm of bad guys to a pulp. Myha’la’s conflicted performance as the sister who resents her older sibling for leaving her in an abusive situation—also a throughline in “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come”—is quite moving and gives Asia something to fight for, which she does with increasingly creative ways to kill her enemies. Aside from a truly unsavory end, Arquette’s performance as the stern-faced matriarch is actually quite fun, as are Tom Felton and Heather Graham’s turns as evil henchmen who willingly step up to be mangled many times over.
Paying homage and doing it well is an incredibly tough act to pull off, and Sokolov never quite hits the right mark. Melding all of these different references, styles, and tones is an art of its own, and while “They Will Kill You” makes little sense, it is enjoyable at times thanks to the buckets of blood and sweat spilled over the many floors of this nightmare co-op. Unfortunately, the film ends with an over-the-top finale that gets quite silly, squandering some of the honest-to-goodness impressive fight choreography for a CGI mess. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and the levels of excess here prove the old adage still rings true.
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