September 5, 2020
"The Boys" (2019) was an 8-episode series on Amazon Prime about a ragtag group of vengeful vigilantes who dared to go against the multi-billion-dollar Vought International corporation and its elite stable of celebrity superheroes called the Seven. This bold premise of this genre-busting show was that it gleefully shattered the respectable veneer of popular superhero organizations, like the Avengers from Marvel or the Justice League from DC.
Four members of the Seven were based on DC heroes: the Superman-like Homelander (Antony Starr), the Wonder Woman-like Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), the Aquaman-like The Deep (Chace Crawford), and the Flash-like A-Train (Jesse T. Usher). There was also an invisible man Translucent (Alex Hassell) and a silent masked strongman Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell). When the pyrokinetic Lamplighter retired, a new member was chosen to join them -- the electricity-absorbing girl-next door who called herself Starlight (Erin Moriarty).
The titular Boys were a group of people who had been wronged by the actions of the Seven. Their leader was Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) whose wife Becca (Shantel VanSenten) went missing after an unfortunate encounter with Homelander. His bickering cohorts in his vigilante operations were Marvin a.k.a. Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso) and Frenchie (Tomer Capon). The newest recruit was mousy electronic store sales clerk Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) whose girlfriend Robin suffered a grisly death in an accident involving A-Train in Episode 1.
As of now, only the first three episodes of Season 2 have been released. So far from the first sequences, the blood and gore levels had certainly not let up, or perhaps even leveled up a notch causing me to flinch away from the screen a bit more this time around. There were more bodies and body parts being crushed, blown up and severed -- more collateral damage caused by super-powers running amuck. There was even a major shocking scene where a blue whale was involved in a literally gut-splitting incident.
Absolutely every scene with the unpredictable Homelander in it was wrapped in gut-wrenching tension, even if it was just a quiet scene at home involving a young boy Ryan. There was a new girl in the Seven who called herself Stormfront (Aya Cash). Aside from the lightning bolts she threw out from her hands, she is cocky and fearless of authority from Day 1. The whole Vought Corporation is under fire because a major company secret has been revealed to the public, which means they would be spending the rest of the season on damage control.
Unlike the typical superheroes, the "heroes" in this dark, gory and very violent series were arrogant, slimy, manipulative, abusive, fake, ruthless, and outright sinister as they way they had never been portrayed before. While the series was addicting to binge watch, you'll feel somehow a part of your childhood was being corrupted. This scathing series would seem to be an apt antidote for anyone with goody-goody superhero fatigue, but it teetered on going overboard, hence the tendency to polarize viewers. It is bold, original, iconoclastic, yes, but it is definitely not for the faint of heart. 8/10.
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