The Boys Season 4 Good Writing And Acting Overall Good Season and Adult Sense
The Boys Review
Now that superhero weariness seems to have set in, this year has been rather free of comic book movies on screen. The Boys‘ fourth season on Prime Video is a brilliant counterbalance to mundane super narrative, even though the genre is still plagued by predictable plots and declining results. It continues to disgust and unsettle with an unashamed enthusiasm.
With its previous seasons and a spinoff at Godolkin University last year, the show established its super-saturated universe. Now, with a calmer, more introspective approach, Season 4 dives headfirst into the rotten quagmire of its characters’ psyches.
Still portrayed with alarming abandon by Antony Starr, Homelander is experiencing an existential crisis as he examines a solitary golden pubic hair with dismay. Starr’s portrayal perfectly portrays the sense of a god struggling with his own mortality—his frenzied bouts interspersed with spooky quiet—imagine Squidward crippled by Tentacle Acres’ monotony.
Homelander appears to be both self-assured and extremely uneasy about the sycophancy surrounding him, having more unbridled power than ever before. This contradiction is exemplified by his compulsive drive to dominate everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity, including his own kid, in an effort to create a legacy that will outlive his own waning dominance. One of the scariest villains on television gains an intriguing new dimension with this obsession with his legacy and looming mortality, which heightens the menacingness of his spiral into lunacy.
Newcomers to the Seven, such as Valerie Curry’s Firecracker and Susan Heyward’s Sister Sage, bring a lethal spice to the already formidable combination. Known as the smartest person on the planet, Sister Sage turns into a cunning participant in Homelander’s schemes, while Firecracker, an alt-right conspiracy theorist, seems like a figure lifted from out of the pages of today’s newspapers and stretched to ludicrous proportions.
The Boys themselves are in top form. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) gets a more substantial (if somewhat tedious) subplot negotiating a problematic relationship, while Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) determines that the best way to deal with her past is to destroy it. Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) battle with their own personal issues, while Butcher (Karl Urban) demonstrates unexpected depth fuelled by a terminal diagnosis, balancing his brutal retribution with a reluctant parental instinct. While they feel more like filler than usual, these arcs provide a rough emotional backbone that keeps the season grounded among its current round of outrageous shenanigans.
With an election year setting and an election year release, The Boys continues to wield satire with a gut-busting (literally) abandon, holding up a cracked mirror to the modern American political environment. Homelander channels the narcissism of authoritarian bullies in power, and his orange underwear and populist bravado are a not-so-subtle allusion to a recently convicted tangerine dictator. Vought International, the show’s huge, corrupt company, mocks the insidious power of big business in politics, turning corporate misconduct into a warped art form. By taking these themes to grotesque extremes, the series delivers an unsettlingly accurate commentary on the fragile state of democracy and the insidious nature of power in the twenty-first century.
Of course, The Boys wouldn’t be complete without their trademark hyperviolence and immorality. So far, we’ve seen a few ordinary Homelander laserings, a few of faces pulverized beyond recognition, and some auto-erotic Human Centipede. Oh, and The Deep is still dealing with the octopus.
Despite its incisive observations on the limits of human nature and societal decay, the series maintains a cynical sense of optimism. Where the moral didacticisms of superhero movies are either imploding or stagnating, The Boys appears to stand boldly tall, its blood-soaked cape flying in the wind, all the while making us laugh, gag, and grimace at the folly of its own diabolic existence.
The Boys Season 4 is now streaming on Prime Video
