I know no one could have planned for the year-long lockdown we’ve been trapped in. Intellectually, I get that. But boy, it feels like it sometimes. Because it seems like there has been more and more time loop media lately, right? Stories about being trapped in the same situation day in and day out? It’s probably confirmation bias, a conflation of a few years worth of media popping up in my head at the same time. That said, I will say that I’ve been drawn to stories like that more in the last year than I had before. From roguelike games such as Curse of the Dead Gods to romantic comedies like Palm Springs, I’ve been living the same thing over and over pretty often. So of course I had to check out Hulu’s new release, Joe Carnahan’s time loop action thriller, Boss Level.
“Can you imagine waking up every day…”
Roy (Frank Grillo) is an alcoholic former special forces soldier. For months now, every day he wakes up at the exact same time to the exact same machete narrowly missing his head. From there, it’s off to the races. Roy has to navigate the city, figure out what’s happening to him, and evade a team of colorful assassins hired to murder him in increasingly brutal ways.
All-in-all, it’s a bad day for Roy. It gets worse when he learns that his ex-wife and love of his life, Jemma (Naomi Watts) died that morning. But that kicks off a question: Could his neverending day have something to do with her murder? And could her shady boss (Mel Gibson) and his henchman (Will Sasso) have something to do with it?
Roy will kill (and die) his way across the city to find out.
“… with some random asshole like Mr. Good Morning here trying to hack you up with a fucking machete?”
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Fuck Mel Gibson. He adds nothing to a minimal role. Look, everyone has different barometers for the levels of shittiness they’re willing to tolerate for a great performance, and I respect that. But Gibson doesn’t give a great performance. He’s… fine, at best. He’s coasting. It seems like Joe Carnahan cast him just to trigger the libs, because he certainly didn’t cast him for his acting chops. Gibson was at one time an electric performer. Those years are long gone. Blessedly, we waste little time on him.
Frank Grillo is… well, he’s certainly the most cut hardcore alcoholic I’ve ever seen. In some ways, this is the ur-example of RS Benedict’s excellent essay, “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.” Grillo’s body is a weapon.We may see him wake up next to a cute blonde, but the movie later assures us that they never had sex. Instead, Grillo is, for much of the film, dedicated to giving and receiving slapstick violence. Still, Grillo brings a world-weariness to the character that makes him charming. And as he unravels the timeloop, I actually found Grillo’s performance to be genuinely emotional.
Which is good, because this is essentially a one-man show. Watts is even less of a presence than Gibson, mostly resigned to a couple small scenes. Ken Jeong is grating as a bartender Roy visits so he can drink himself to death. The assassins don’t really get ‘lines’, per se. They each have a schtick (redneck assassin! lady assassins! Chinese swordswoman!) and, well, that’s mostly it. The closest thing we have to another real character is Will Sasso, a meathead security chief who manages to be goofy and intimidating all in one.
“This might have been fun for awhile.”
Honestly, it’s kind of weird that Carnahan returned to the “multiple assassins going after one guy” well after Smokin’ Aces. It wasn’t great then. Hell, some the archetypes are even basically the same. Still, most of them here only exist to kill or be killed in increasingly ridiculous ways. And honestly, Boss Level mostly delivers. Outside of the opening hand-to-hand fight, most of the action isn’t that impressive, but it is often funny, at least.
A bigger weakness comes with the only assassin who gets much by way of face time, Guan Yin (Selina Lo). Lo is good in a small role, but late in the film, she and Grillo have a swordfight and… it’s bad. Quick cuts everywhere try to hide the fact that the fight choreography just… wasn’t really there. What should be a climactic moment is completely wasted until its final flourish. It felt like Carnahan just lost interest in it. He’s more comfortable doing bombastic gun battles and explosions. Carnahan is good with the imagery of action cinema, but less so with its pacing and presentation.
Still, Grillo is a good action star, even if the action around him isn’t always exceptional. He knows how to sell it. Just like a romance movie lives and dies on how its leads look at one another, an action movie needs a lead can project underdog confidence as he wreaks imaginary violence. Grillo excels at that. His line readings are flavorful but dulled down a notch, exhausted without feeling bored. He carries the whiplash tonal shifts of Boss Level on his shoulders and he nails it. Even when the film’s screenwriters are giving him the worst faux-tough guy schlock imaginable, Grillo still mostly sells it.
“Once the shock wore off, once I realized what the hell was happening…”
A core feature of the time loop movie is the lesson the main character has to learn to escape it. Sometimes, a lesson has to be learned. Other times, they have to choose to leave it. Either way, leaving the time loop is almost always tied to personal growth in some way. And this, to me, is where Boss Level went from a so-so action comedy to a genuinely interesting film, as it almost reverses this trope.
Years ago, Roy had a kid with Jemma. And then he disappeared. Joe knows who Roy is, but he doesn’t know he’s his father, just that he’s a friend of his mother. Eventually, Roy runs into Joe at a… pop-up e-sports tournament where they play inexplicably non-competitive games? Whatever. Joe loves Street Fighter. Roy initially dismisses the hobby and thinks his son is getting up to some shady shit. But over time, Roy changes his mind. After he learns to take out the assassins, rather than trying to break the loop, he decides to use it to get to know his son.
What follows is a surprisingly sweet montage. Anyone who has had a loved one get deeply invested in a hobby you neither understand nor care about will see what comes next. Roy doesn’t really get the appeal of the games, but he does get the appeal of spending time with his son. So he grows to love them. For hours every day, Roy wakes up, kills the assassins, and then just gets to know his child. It isn’t the way he escapes, or the reason he wants to escape. Instead, as with Palm Springs, he has to learn to want more.
“… after nearly 140 times, it just got fucking annoying.”
And that, I think, is why this deeply mediocre movie stuck out to me in quarantine. It’s easy to fall into patterns, particularly unhealthy ones. And there are times when I do. I feel safe, in my home, eating ice cream and just waiting for time to pass. But the most satisfying moments of my quarantine are when I pushed myself to stay connected with my loved ones, to try something new, to wrest time for something special for myself. The hardest lesson to learn in isolation was to want to do the things that no one could push me to do anymore.
Boss Level isn’t particularly good. As I mentioned, Carnahan just isn’t particularly interested in either action or comedy to make a compelling action-comedy. But the movie did find enough pathos, thanks to a meaningful third-act turn and an excellent lead performance, to overcome those flaws. And maybe it helped that they cast Frank Grillo’s real-life son as his son in the movie. Perhaps that added some small bit of verisimilitude. I don’t know.
What I do know is that Boss Level is a deeply flawed movie that still managed to speak to me. Maybe it’ll speak to you too. Or maybe you’ll do the smart thing, see that Mel Gibson is in this before you press play, and just go, nah, I’ve got better things to do with my life.
Who can say?