Movie theater closures benefit nobody, and shouldn’t under any circumstance or for any reason be celebrated. But movie theater closures have created an atmosphere lost to the moviegoing public for over a decade: One where no superhero movies open wide all over the world and choke out multiplexes with corporate amusements made to pantomime human experience as they drag audiences on suffocating roller coaster rides. How strange not to see Marvel on marquees, and what an anticlimactic time for Amazon to release the second season of “The Boys,” Eric Kripke’s adaptation of the graphic (with extra emphasis on “graphic”) novels by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.
What reads so oddly about “The Boys” in its second season is the lack of contrast in 2020 pop culture: The MCU is on hiatus thanks to COVID-19, and while the MCU is frankly the only real game in town for superheroes even in better times where people can buy overpriced tickets and eat overpriced popcorn without fear of viral death, its absence is felt perhaps more within the context of “The Boys” than on the big screen.
But with the air clearer, “The Boys” has more room to breathe, which means its naked satire of shameless marketing, messaging, and branding, all warped around costumed men and women who make the world better by punching CGI bugaboos with no regard for collateral damage, hits with greater clarity. Watching the Seven, comprising Earth’s mightiest heroes in “The Boys,” grandstand in hideously filtered sequences on the set of propaganda blockbusters funded to cash in on and further facilitate their public images mocks Marvel’s production process and tells viewers precisely how seriously they should take the MCU as product and entertainment. In the absence of the “Black Widow” movie, for instance, delayed until November, these sequences punch harder. There’s no alternative out there to distract from Kripke’s commentary.
Subtext aside, “The Boys” continues on as “The Boys” does, picking up where the Season 1 finale cut off: Becca Butcher (Shantel VanSanten) suffers unwelcome visits from sociopath Superman analogue, Homelander (Antony Starr), her rapist and the father to her son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), as mother and child live in obscurity verging on captivity. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), Homelander having pulled the curtain back on this awful circumstance to torment him, makes his way back to New York to reunite with the Boys; the Boys—Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capon), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara)—are in hiding now that they’re America’s most wanted; Starlight (Erin Moriarity) continues to serve as one of the Seven despite her undisguised misgivings about the team and her relationship with them. That’s the foundation of the A-plot. The B-plots (because there’s enough B-level material here that none of it sinks to the C-level) are many and varied.
The redemption of the Deep (Chace Crawford), former member of the Seven and a sexual predator, who stays in exile trying to figure himself out is also dealt with. Crawford’s doing some of the best work of his career here playing on the Deep’s pathos while shaping him into a dumb but chiseled clay slab, something people can mold with into what they want him to be; “The Boys” doesn’t ask the audience to forgive him so much as understand him. It’s a compelling angle. Strewn among carnage, cussing, super-sex, and other narratives of sexual misconduct, plus big buckets of weirdness splattered pell-mell all over the show’s frames, the Deep’s journey is robbed of consideration and distracts from “The Boys’” focal points.
Which, again, are many. Power corrupts, money corrupts the powerful, and Vought, the vile company in charge of the Seven’s public personas and responsible for making them into superheroes in the first place, is a confluence of corruption. It’s the big spinning wheel responsible for the misery and brutality inflicted on the world, its influence no longer contained to just the United States. The Seven is a drone strike waiting to happen, its members on hand to eliminate super terrorists (super villains, as Homelander prefers) all over the globe while inflicting collateral damage without remorse or pity. That apathy comes back to bite the country in the ass as villains abroad are smuggled onto American shores, just one thread tying into overarching themes of xenophobia and nationalism.
Neither of these elements are new to “The Boys,” but they’ve been inflated. Homelander naturally thinks everyone is beneath him, but he especially thinks folks living outside of America are beneath him; his beliefs are indulged by Stormfront (Aya Cash), the new girl, Instagram-famous and with a real talent for spreading around the same Facebook memes that have your parents voting for Trump. There’s nothing subtle about her true intentions: She’s David Duke, except she’s a better actor and she has powers beyond a gift for duping the public. Like Duke, she understands that white supremacy can hover off-radar if it wears a suit and speaks in a language composed of feigned civility. Only people practiced and fluent in the dialect understand the violence inherent in the words, and by then, it’s too late.
Violence, of course, is “The Boys”’ bread and butter, but so is the bizarre. And they’re rarely mutually exclusive. Effectively, they combine to make gruesome comedy, with obvious exceptions: Wanton mayhem caused by demigods always leaves casualties in its wake, and those casualties are never less than upsetting. A guy getting his face torn off? That’s a laugh. Bystanders getting bisected by Homelander’s eye lasers, or fried by Stormfront on purpose? Her name gives away the game. The casting gives the character soul: Cash does Cash, spicing her scenes with sarcasm, snark, and shrugging apathy, like if Gretchen Cutler (the actress’ character from the FX comedy series, “You’re the Worst“) could shoot lightning from her fingertips and also hated people of color with a murderous passion.
Amazing that “The Boys” juggles each of its storylines without fumbling most of them. Conceptually, the season’s a jumble. Practically, it works remarkably well, juvenile in the way everything producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg touch should be but smart enough to know when not to be dumb as rocks (or, at least, to know when to take itself seriously and when to burst heads like grapes). And as superhero fare in a drought, when its competition cum object of derision can’t talk over it, “The Boys” is close to instructive. [B]
“The Boys” Season 2 debuts on Amazon Prime Video on September 4.
