The Boys - Season 1 Review (Spoiler Review)
Juiced up Superheroes living in their ivory towers claiming to be our saviours while creating false threats to justify their existence - The Boys peels the masks right off the superheroes
Created by Eric Kripke and streaming on Amazon Prime, the tone of the first few minutes dives into the Sokovian like mood when the superheroes regret the collateral damage in wake of their efforts for the greater good. What is quickly becomes evident that these heroes don’t really care who dies, they just care for the bad press.
The Seven are your league of extraordinarily corporate superheroes (or ‘supes’ as referred to in the show) who market their personas through social media, advertising, film contracts and merchandising to earn billions. Their leader, Homelander, is the answer to the question - What if Superman stopped believing in truth and justice. Rest of this super-dochebags include Maeve (who dresses like Wonder Woman but can’t even fight like Zena, the warrior princess), Black Noir (if Snake-eyes from G.I. Joe was mixed with Slade Wilson), A-Train (Flash but with powers waning and using Compound V to boost his speed), Translucent (the indestructible invisible man who lurks around the loo and gets it right up his tail-pipe, literally) and Starlight (the teen beauty queen who just wants world peace – and is ready to go down on all fours to get in a big-league)
The opposites are ‘The Boys’, a group of anti-supe vigilantes who are hell-bent of unmasking these false gods and show the world who they really are – monsters bred in a lab. The leader of this group of misfits is Billy Butcher (Karl Urban really stands out as a sleazy brit who would do anything, say anything to get revenge from Homelander for his missing-presumed-dead-but-still-alive-wife). Mother’s Milk (now this is a story arc I want to know), Frenchie (a Frenchman with a French-beard, a walking cliché if there ever was one) and Hughie (Hugh Campbell played by Jack Quaid, a wimp whose girlfriend becomes an accidental casualty by A-Train and who ends up killing Translucent by detonating an explosive up Translucent’s invisible asshole) make up the rest of this quadret.
What this season sorely missed was a strong villain, Yes, one may think Homelander is your guy, the stone-cold, narcissistic megalomaniac who could, and does, kill innocent to start a war just so he can end it himself. Now, there was a hint of Mr Edgar, the man who would write the speeches and send them to Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Sue), who never came down from floor 99 to meet The Seven, who almost had a Kingpin vibe. But alas! Giancario Esposito as Stan Edgar is neither menacing nor scary. He is a suit and a very typical one at that. What The Boys needed was someone like a Moses Randolph (Motherless Brooklyn) or a Thanos (MCU). We needed Darth Vader, and we get Orson Krennic. Sure, Krennic is good, but people will think twice before crossing Vader.
I would watch it for Karl Urban’s performance alone. But hopefully, season two develops the other characters more deeply than season 1.
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