But let’s not act as if its the long-awaited mash-up of Shakespeare and Stan Lee.
Highly entertaining but grossly flawed, The Boys envisions itself as the bad boy of superhero stories. Likewise, The Boys delights as a stark departure from the expected norms of comic book content right up until the point it doesn’t. Half an hour later, you might be ready to shove that hotel down your best friend’s throat. Ten minutes into a game of Monopoly and you’ll still find everyone enjoying the glacial advance of capitalistic conquest. This may not be the most eloquent nugget of critical thinking but: yuck. Then there’s the clear pleasure The Boys takes in its own pain, celebrating its gory graphicness far more than even Game of Thrones dared to do. It’s less character development and more plot mechanics papered over with side-eyed emotion. Yet the plot demands that he still wheel and deal with various powerful factions and shadowy figures who trust him despite his abysmal track record. In a very literal reading, Karl Urban’s swaggering Billy Butcher fails to deliver on his promises every single time across both seasons.
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They continue to make the same mistakes over and over and not in the same way that Tony Soprano’s cyclical behavior became the backbone of a series and a valuable piece of commentary in its own right. Nothing changes in this world and the same holds true for our characters. “The good guys don’t win and the bad guys don’t get punished,” another says in the season’s penultimate chapter. “Fuck this world for confusing nice with good,” one character says in the second episode. Too many wink-wink jokes leave Season 2 half a degree removed from Deadpool and not nearly as subversive.
But they also prevent The Boys from being as boldly anachronistic as it likes to think it is. Meta jokes featuring a brief cameo from Seth Rogen (who serves as a real-life executive producer) and cracks at modern pop culture (fictitious film “Dawn of the Seven” puts Zack Snyder in its crosshairs) score laughs. The Boys is bereft of hope (outside of Jack Quaid’s puppy-like Hughie), which is a surprisingly effective take.īut the show also can’t help but get in its own way. It also dispels any romantic notions we have about the agendas of powerful institutional bodies such as big business, government and religions pillars of “civilized” society that are meant to provide security and structure. Season 2 is an attempt to re-contextualize modern ethical heroics and our relationship to publicly anointed figures. Hell, Saturday’s DC FanDome just introduced the third big screen iteration of Batman in the last eight years. The Boys admirably wants to deconstruct the superhero, a welcomed approach in an era of mass-produced and homogenized capes-and-cowl content ranging from the MCU, DCEU, Arrowverse and beyond.