The Boys review – sick of superheroes? Here's the remedy
Superheroes are big business, literally, in Amazon’s fantastical new comedy. The timing seems apt – The Boys touches down just as Avengers: Endgame has nudged past Avatar to become the most successful film of all time. For those who simply cannot get enough of superheroes, it puts a wicked spin on some now very familiar archetypes: the fierce warrior queen, the licketysplit speedster, the flag-draped megagod walking among us. But if you are sick to the back teeth of billowing capes, The Boys also offers a sly corrective to our current era of blind hero worship by aiming some nasty kicks at their softest parts. It is gleeful, violent and blackly comic, a raucous rocket full of Kryptonite.
The Boys takes place in a world where the so-called ‘super-abled’ are both real and omnipresent, dominating culture and commerce in a way that seems inevitable. The brightest and best are the Seven, a shiny supergroup represented by the blandly ominous Vought corporation and directed by calculating powerbroker Madelyn (Elisabeth Shue). These costumed paragons have been commercialised to an extent that even the Marvel merchandising machine might find a little distasteful. Between chat show appearances and energy-drink endorsements, the occasional bit of evil-doing is photogenically foiled, although Vought is also eyeing up some lucrative government defence contracts.
At first we see the stage-managed public face of these heroes through the eyes of admirers. Timid electronics store clerk Hughie (Jack Quaid) is one of the little people, happy to gaze up in awe at these larger-than-life champions. Annie AKA strobing crimefighter Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is a hard-working small-town hero whose future suddenly looks bright when she gets an audition to join the Seven. After a brace of upsetting encounters – one
that leaves so much blood and viscera on the street that some viewers might decide to click over to the rather more jolly Good Omens – the scales fall from Hughie and Annie’s eyes. Turns out most superheroes have super-flaws and super-vices (as evidenced in an eyebrow-raising sex club scene). But if you pick a fight with Superman, how can you possibly win?
Enter Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a shady CIA-type with a wandering Cockney accent and a fondness for swinging a crowbar. Butcher wants to reactivate his ad-hoc anti-superhero unit the Boys and sees Hughie as the first potential recruit. This cranks up the tension that fizzes through the rest of the eight-part series. It is essentially a tale of asymmetrical warfare as Butcher, Hughie and some other unexpected allies try to outmanoeuvre opponents with colossal strength, X-ray vision and super-hearing. As baseline humans, the Boys have to rely on cunning, inventive cruelty and dumb luck.
The Boys shares some DNA with Preacher, another caustic and hyperviolent tale familiar to Amazon Prime viewers in the UK (although unlike The Boys, it is produced by AMC). Both shows are based on comics by Garth Ennis – a writer who enjoys kneecapping authority figures, be they in capes or cassocks – and have been shepherded to the screen by producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The Boys has been repositioned for the US market – Hughie was originally Scottish and short, while Quaid is a wiry American six-footer – but as with Preacher, Rogen and Goldberg seem keen to honour the source material, and not just by faithfully reproducing Butcher’s barrage of F-bombs. Darick Robertson, the artist who co-created The Boys, based Hughie’s likeness on Simon Pegg, who gamely appears here as Hughie’s exasperated dad, a presumably fairly expensive in-joke.
For those that relish the luridness of Preacher, The Boys is similarly OTT but even scuzzier, operating in an often-nocturnal world of alleys, dive bars and basement boltholes. From behind a hefty beard, Urban is louche but menacing as Butcher, especially when eyeballing Homelander (Antony Starr), the golden-haired, shiny-toothed, seemingly perfect Superman surrogate. Amid all the flashy superhero grandstanding and cool antihero posturing, it is left to the youngest cast members to play something more relatable. While both have an appealing innocence, it is Moriarty’s maltreated but undaunted Starlight who, appropriately, feels like she is preventing the whole thing from collapsing into darkness.
With a second season already confirmed, The Boys is clearly ticking the right boxes for Amazon. They might even allow themselves a supervillain’s manic chuckle that they managed to get their deconstruction of superheroes out into the streaming wild before HBO’s similarly-themed Watchmen sequel series glides into view. But perhaps the best way to approach The Boys is to view it through the prism of another revered comic: Billy Butcher sounds like a Viz character, and the whole series channels the same anarchic, profane energy. Season one of The Boys launches on Amazon Prime Video on 26 July.