Film Review: Boss Level, Directed by Joe Carnahan

Boss Level is a guilty delight of madness and adrenaline from director Joe Carnahan, spraying commentary and humour alongside its thousands of bullets and fountains of blood, while providing a unique and truly enjoyable twist on traditional action films.

Written by Chris Borey, Eddie Borey, and Carnahan, Boss Level manages to toe the line between tongue-in-cheek self-awareness and classic 80s style action cliches. It’s a film that can easily get away with (and justify) tropes that would leave an otherwise ‘serious’ action film feeling laughable. But here, the audience is invited to laugh along, partly due to the absurdity of the storyline, but largely because the writing is genuinely excellent when it dives deep into the film’s gallows humour.

Frank Grillo plays Roy Pulver, an ex-Delta Force stack of muscle and grit stuck in the endless time loop of Groundhog Day, but hunted by the cartoonishly violent assassins of Polar. Fans of Carnahan’s early work will notice the influences of the Smokin’ Aces universe, but with the madness and bone-dry nihilistic humour dialled up to the extreme.

Boss Level opens with the 8-bit title of Attempt 139: Roy narrates in a casually exhausted tone as he wakes to a machete-wielding maniac striking deep into the headboard above his perfect hairline, and things only get worse. Roy’s reaction and narration during this opening scene set the tone well for his character; a man so worn down by the repetition of his dilemma that he’s comfortable drinking a cup of coffee and moping over to his couch in Shakespearean disdain as a helicopter rains minigun bullets around his silhouette.

Exploding buildings, high-rise jumps to well-timed trucks, casual strolls across 4-lane rush-hour highways, car theft and high-speed drifting through traffic, pistol-wielding assassin duos, bus crashes with faces full of windshield shrapnel, and at least another two paragraphs of single-sentence descriptors that I won’t spoil any more of – and this is the first nine minutes of the 92-minute action-movie love letter.

Afterwards, the film allows the viewer a respite and slows down slightly until the halfway point, filling in the necessary story to keep the narrative flowing and introducing some excellent supporting comedy from Chef Jake (Ken Jeong) and Dave (Sheaun McKinney). Just as you might begin to discount the film for its lack of new-found lack of adrenaline, Roy finds a unique direction that leads him through another daily montage of bloody nightmares.

Roy persists through over 200+ “attempts” to understand and conquer his day, and this is a great way of keeping the action and pacing tight while our anti-hero gradually uncovers the full suspension-of-disbelief mystery, and without relying on a moustache-twirling villain to unnecessarily explain everything in the film’s closing moments.

The time-loop explanation also acts as a refreshing justification for allowing ridiculous over-the-top fights and actions sequences without relying on the caricature of an invincible, bullet-dodging hero – Roy is a warrior honed by repetition, fighting against one-shot villains who maintain their surprise until the last 30 minutes of the film.

There are still surprises to be had even that late in the game, all of which converge to a multi-layered and satisfying conclusion that leaves few stones left unturned for Roy or the ones he loves. It’s a film that somehow manages to balance an emotional payoff in the middle of all the madness, which leaves the characters feeling a lot more fleshed-out than in some of Carnahan’s previous films.

Grillo is perfect in his role as Pulver, expressing a range of emotion and comedic timing beyond many of his contemporaries, Mel Gibson does wonderfully in trading the villainous moustache for a gruff beard and badass war stories as Colonel Clive Ventor, and while Naomi Watts (as Roy’s “one true love and the key to this mystery” Jemma Wells) seems both underutilised and overused, the full roster of assassins are often so fun to watch that you wish Roy would hit the restart button sooner than he sometimes does.

While Boss Level may give the initial impression of another repetitive action-filled bloodfest, or a tired reimagining of the meta-comedy action genre, it’s a film that isn’t afraid to poke fun of itself until the script draws blood, capable of comfortably balancing style and substance in a slick, highly enjoyable thrill-ride that will make it a joy to repeat over, and over again.

Dir: Joe Carnahan. Starring: Frank Grillo, Mel Gibson, Naomi Watts, Michelle Yeoh, Will Sasso, Anabelle Wallis, Rob Gronkowski, Ken Jeong, Sheaun McKinney.

Oxford Lamoureaux

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