REPETITION KILLS THRILLS
Wake up. Slay a dozen bad guys. Die. Repeat. Roy Pulver (Frank Grillo) might not be very smart, but he is tough. And doggedly loyal to those he loves.
Each morning, the former special forces agent is woken by a machete-wielding assassin.
Having been in this position many times before — Boss Level is Groundhog Day with a brutal, scifi twist — Pulver neutralises Mr Good Morning just in time to dodge a hail of bullets that rains down upon him from a helicopter hovering outside his apartment window.
Once he’s dealt with both the gunman and the pilot, Pulver anticipates the resultant explosion by leaping into a passing rubbish truck several floors below, after which he carjacks a muscle car in order to outrun the two hitwomen who are about to give chase.
The action hero has played out this scenario on 139 previous occasions before we join him.
But he’ll have to do it a couple of dozen more times before he begins to see the bigger picture ... by which point only hard-core action fans will remain.
Boss Level’s premise — of a reluctant hero caught in a real-life video game until he pieces together the missing clues to solve the existential puzzle — is a potentially interesting twist on timeloop predecessors such as Source Code, Looper and Edge of Tomorrow.
But director Joe Carnahan (The Grey) drastically over-estimates the appeal of seeing the same serviceable action choreography — slicing, skewering, shooting, incineration and decapitation — over and over again, with only minor variations.
The repetition quickly becomes tiresome. More liberal use of the fast forward button might have allowed further development of some of the film’s other thematic strands.
Mel Gibson’s bearded, megalomaniacal villain, Colonel Clive Ventor, is as one-dimensional as the prototypical assassins who are relentlessly pursuing the film’s protagonist.
Michelle Yeoh’s role as the master swordswoman who teaches Pulver the skills he needs to survive Guan-Yin’s (Selina Lo) razor sharp blade is at best perfunctory — and surely someone could have come up with a better signature line for Lo’s ironically named Goddess of Mercy.
Naomi Watts, an actor who rarely turns in a bad performance, can do little with her thinlywritten role as Pulver’s ex, a scientist working on a top-secret project for Ventor.
While the action sequences carry Grillo a bit further, he’s on a hiding to nothing when it comes to the turgid voice-over narration. Only in the scenes between Pulver and the son (Rio Grillo) he has neglected carry any real emotional weight, which is just as well, since these are the catalyst for a significant shift in tone.
The central character in time loop movies nearly always has an important life lesson to learn and Boss Level is no exception.
Pulver — and by association the film’s audience — gets there the hard way. And the rewards are strictly limited for all concerned.