‘They Will Kill You’ Has a Massive Tarantino Fetish

The ultra-rich, they’re not like you and me. They cozy up to corrupt administrations, and treat human rights like inconveniences. They buy legacy newspapers and throw billions at media companies so they can push private political agendas. They make deals with the devil in exchange for immortality and truly extraordinary New York real estate. You don’t need to have scanned the Epstein files back to front to realize that when it comes to the One-percent, offering the occasional sacrifice to the Prince of Darkness is hardly the most outrageous or offensive thing you could picture them doing now. Nor do you have to pine for a place in the Dakota, a.k.a. the apartment building in Rosemary’s Baby, to imagine New Yorkers joining Satanic cults to secure spots in an exclusive Manhattan co-op. Nail down that rent-controlled two-bedroom any way you can, folks.

That 1968 Roman Polanski horror film casts a long shadow over They Will Kill You, which also involves unwitting victims, eccentric neighbors, heinous rituals, and Hell’s landlord. So does John Wick, especially when it comes to the go-for-broke set pieces. Zazie Beetz trained for months to pull off the admittedly jaw-dropping (and often jaw-shattering) fight sequences, and if every actor is now destined to become an action star for 15 minutes, the Atlanta veteran has earned her spotlight. The semi-obscure Seventies trashterpiece The Sentinel, a host of eat-the-rich satires, and a lot of vintage Forty-Deuce programming have been thrown into the melting pot as well, right down to a visual palette you could describe as Instagram Grindhouse Filter. But the single most overwhelming influence — even without the conspicuous shots of Beetz’s bare feet — is a certain Quentin Tarantino opus from the early 21st century. A more accurate title for this exploitation-flick mixtape might have been They Will Kill-Bill You.

It’s not a crime to rip off the auteur who whet modern audiences’ appetites for postmodern genre exercises — half the filmmakers of the mid-1990s would be serving hard time if that was the case. But the Tarantino fetish becomes so pronounced in Russian writer-director Kirill Sokolov’s addition to the grungy revenge-thriller that every quick zoom and shock-cinema score cue starts to feel less like an adrenaline spike and more like a rib nudge. Look, we’re the last folks who are likely to turn our nose up at someone battling pig-masked goons with a flaming axe in a darkened ballroom. It’s just that the delivery system designed to get you from one showstopping mano a mano to the next begins to feel so derivative that not even the pulp pleasures of Beetz kicking mondo ass can keep this from feeling like a reheated fast-food binge.

Her hero is named Asia Reaves, a hardbitten survivor of an abusive household and a decade-long prison sentence. The goal: find her kid sister Maria, who she’s lost track of while in the clink. The location of said sibling: The Virgil, a tony apartment complex somewhere in upper Manhattan that’s favored by the elite of the elite. The now-grown Maria (Industry‘s Myha’la) works there as a housemaid. Asia has also procured a job under false pretenses, so she can rescue her.

The primary obstacle to accomplishing this? It seems that the Virgil’s residents worship the Horned One, and their master requires a sacrifice, and guess who the sacrificial lamb is supposed to be? Asia has come prepared with a sawed-off shotgun, a sword, and her own well-honed skills in taking own several combatants as once. It’s just that, due to a series of plot twists too convoluted to get into even if we weren’t anti-spoiler adherents, the people pursuing the Reaves sisters can’t be dispatched so easily. So they have to keep fighting off an army of cult members led by the building’s superintendent (Patricia Arquette, battling an Irish accent and occasionally winning) and find a way to escape the heavily locked down joint, one dangerous floor at a time.

This scenario is bad news for anyone who requires their B movies to do more than resemble role-playing video games, and great news for viewers content to simply bask in the glory of Zazie Beetz stabbing, shooting, kicking, cold-cocking, running, jumping, and serving up righteous vengeance in bulk. Kill Bill, you may recall, was as much a love letter to its star as it was a mash note to the gamut of exploitation-cinema genres. And while Sokolov and his cowriter Alex Litvak aren’t interested in paying homage to the ghosts of grindhouses past, they’ve definitely crafted a similar valentine to their lead. If nothing else, They Will Kill You is a nifty proof of concept for positioning Beetz as an above-the-title stalwart for future ass-whooping affairs. Her supporting turn in Deadpool 2 hinted at her action-hero capabilities. This confirms them with honors.

Does that fact end up keeping Kill on life support for anybody but die-hard Beetzheads? Sure, we guess, if you don’t mind the déjà vu and drive-by class commentary. (That many of the non-white workers at the Virgil have been co-opted into their employer’s corrupt rituals out of sheer survival is a nice but way underutilized detail; the sight of two women of color fighting their way through a pale aristocracy hellbent on killing them, however, says more than enough on its own.) Beetz deserves a better, sturdier showcase, as do us fans of exploitation movies that lace their violent, giddy, gory choreography with more than just cheap dopamine dumps. The flip side is that, because of this, she could end up getting it down the road. May it let a thousand Zazie-led screen massacres bloom.