Zazie Beetz brings grace to the gory action routine of They Will Kill You

Some years ago, Zazie Beetz had the unlikely distinction of emerging from a Deadpool movie as a potentially credible action star, in large part because her character Domino was only a figurative cartoon character, rather than one literally brought to life with computer effects. That’s not to say her fight scenes avoided heavy CG trickery; just that Beetz looked the least dragged-and-dropped into the action, maybe paradoxically owing to her unflappable deadpan. Beetz makes a belated return to action with They Will Kill You, a movie that seems like it shares DNA with the Deadpool movies—as so many recent action movies do, even when they’re aiming for The Raid. It’s styled like a comic book that would particularly excite a 12-year-old; relatedly irreverent in its humor; and brazenly, cartoonishly gory in its violence, all qualities that align it with Ready Or Not 2, Pretty Lethal, and Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice—and that only covers its peers of the last week. Deadpool-wise, it does those movies one better by featuring some characters who can (eventually) keep fighting after getting limbs sliced off, just like the merc with the mouth.

Though They Will Kill You is not a true original, it manages to do a little more than bounce around the John Wick-to-Deadpool spectrum (also known as the David Leitch Scale). Despite her connection to one of those franchises, Beetz is one reason why. As Asia Reaves, a woman fresh out of prison who gets a maid job at an upscale apartment building called The Virgil, she’s handed a familiar character: A protective warrior of few words, searching for her younger sister Maria (Myha’la), who she was forced to surrender back to their abusive father when a failed escape resulted in her arrest. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Beetz turns Asia into a fully dimensionalized person. It more than suffices, however, that she fights her way through the pulp with a ferocity that feels genuine.

Asia knows that Maria works somewhere within The Virgil, and knows that she may need her well-honed combat skills to retrieve her. She’s less aware, however, of the building’s specifically sinister nature, hidden by its head of staff Lilith (Patricia Arquette with an Irish accent for some reason) and wealthy tenants like Sharon (Heather Graham) and Kevin (Tom Felton). Compared to the Ready Or Not movies also encompassed by this particular trend, They Will Kill You goes easy on the stale “fucking rich people!” jokes (though it does all but reprise that line from the first Ready Or Not). The Virgil residents are rich and powerful, but they do at least some of their own dirty work, setting upon their new recruit almost immediately; the gnarly resilience of Graham and Felton in particular serves as a funny counterpoint to the usual wave after wave of anonymous henchmen. This may dilute the satire, but They Will Kill You isn’t insightful enough for that to matter much.