Enjoyable action, over and over
Joe Carnahan grew up in Fairfield, not Hong Kong, but you’d never know it by his movies, which stay light on their feet with the fastmoving kineticism and stylish visuals you would expect from the land of John Woo and Johnnie To.
Ever since his $8,000 first feature, “Blood Guts Bullets & Octane” — shot in and around Sacramento — proved a hit at Sundance in 1998, he has been Hollywood’s most underrated action filmmaker. He directed both Liam Neeson’s best film of his ongoing post”Taken” action hero cycle, “The Grey,” and Neeson’s silliest, “The ATeam.” Before that, there was “Narc” and “Smokin’ Aces.”
The madeforHulu action flick “Boss Level,” which opens Friday, March 5, on Hulu, isn’t Carnahan’s best film, but it’s skillfully directed nonsense and has a bigname cast that seems to be having fun. It’s also the latest thriller, after “Source Code” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” to steal the plot device of “Groundhog Day.” (Guess we could now call that a genre.)
So the plot isn’t original — a former special forces officer has to relive the same day over and over and avoid getting killed in order to save his family — but it does mean we see several versions of love interest Naomi Watts, villain Mel Gibson, martial arts expert Michelle Yeoh and bartender Ken Jeong, so things could be worse.
The retired special forces officer, Roy, is played by Frank Grillo, best known as the Marvel supervillain Brock Rumlow/Crossbones in the “Captain America” films and “Avengers: Endgame.” He’s on the outs with his ex, Dr. Jemma Wells (Watts), with whom he shares custody of his son, played by Grillo’s reallife son Rio.
Wells works for Col. Clive Ventor (Gibson) on a topsecret project that she fears the colonel will use for nefarious purposes. She is also the inventor of a machine that, when imprinted with a person’s DNA, can cause said person to relive chunks of time.
When Roy dies, murdered by the colonel’s team of assassins, she slides his DNA in the machine and presto, he’s back. Without knowing quite why he’s reliving the same day over and over, Roy has to get deeper and deeper into the day without getting killed to stop the colonel’s plot, thus saving his son and Wells.
Everyone he meets along the way is a potential nemesis, or an unexpected ally. Yeoh (”Star Trek: Discovery,” “Crazy Rich Asians”), a former Hong Kong action star, teaches Roy to become an expert sword fighter so he can combat expert sword assassin Guan Yin (Selina Lo).
It’s nothing groundbreaking, just goodhumored bloody action directed at a frenetic pace, clocking in at about an hour and a half.
Sometimes you need a little bit of fun, and “Boss Level” delivers.