Boss Level

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For those days when you just want something entertaining – Boss Level, a new Joe Carnhan movie that gives us the familiar Carnahan formula, action plus buffoonery, delivered with a deadpan rictus by a new arrival in geri-action heroics – Frank Grillo.

Grillo plays Roy Pulver, a guy who wakes up every day to the same scenario – a “machete wielding asshole” trying to kill him, followed by an encounter with a helicopter gunship, followed by a deadly explosion and a fall from a high window, after which he’s chased down city streets in fast cars by gun-toting bad guys determined to kill him.

That’s if they haven’t already killed him. Because Pulver has lived through this day before and will live through it again. He’s locked inside a Groundhog Day with extreme prejudice, or closer to the mark is the Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow (whose subtitle: Live Die Repeat is the plot of Boss Level), learning as he goes, surviving just a bit longer than he did the day before – wisdom is power etc.

The reasons have to do with a machine that “unmakes” time, developed by the love of his life but now estranged partner, Jemma (Naomi Watts), and owned and wielded by asshole uberlord Colonel Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson). Or at least Ventor thinks he controls it – in fact things are way out of his control and unbeknown to him Jemma has inserted Roy into the machine and… 

Frank Grillo and Mel Gibson
Badass meets bad guy



You don’t need to know, though you might ask yourself the question at one point, how come all these people are after Roy in his die-rinse-repeat life if Ventor hasn’t got wind of something.

No, no, we really don’t need to go there. Instead let’s marvel at Grillo’s abs, which are fab for a guy in his 50s and look like the result of some human growth hormone dare. Grillo is in fact a hugely likeable lead, trying to be cool so hard that you start feel for him. In a brief interchange with his estranged son at a gamer convention (Grillo’s real son Rio making his screen debut), son Joe asks dad Roy if he’s a badass “like Liam Neeson”. Roy laughs at the comparison, and we laugh back, since that’s pretty much the sort of film this is, just with more hardware and a higher bodycount, the “particular set of skills” being the same.

The screenplay – Carnahan plus Chris and Eddie Borey – knows how to write to our prejudices, in other words. Like the slow turnaround intro it gives to Gibson, the sort of thing designed to raise a round of applause or chorus of boos – either way it works as theatre.

There’s a totemic aspec to Gibson too, since Carnahan is the inheritor of all those 1980s cocaine fuelled actioners of the Lethal Weapon sort, and in film after film – like Smokin’ Aces, Stretch and The A Team – has never allowed plausibility to get in the way of a bit of out and out entertainment.

There’s also a debt owed to the trashier side of Tarantino – the esoteric music choices (Badfinger, at one point) and the characters’ tendency to never shut up.

There are good films, there are important films and there are films like this – pure kinetic entertainment with lots of gadgets, lots of action and an understanding that if it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing fast.

Good also to know is that Carnahan’s next film, Cop Shop, is already in post-production, and teams Grillo up with Gerard Butler for what will surely be an artery-clogging knuckle-feast of badassery, and after that Carnahan is taking on a remake of Gareth Evans’s epic action spectacular The Raid.





Boss Level – Watch it/buy it at Amazon


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© Steve Morrissey 2021






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