Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Boss Level’ on Hulu, An Action Movie Stuck In A Temporal Lock Groove

How many guys does it take to get to the end and win? That’s the question in the arcade game heart of Boss Level (Hulu), an enjoyably chaotic time loop ostinato that pits Frank Grillo’s ex-soldier against a perpetual host of hired killers. He’ll fall off a building as many times as it takes to discover why his day is stuck on repeat.  

BOSS LEVEL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: It’s all just a little bit of history repeating. Or at least, that’s what it feels like, with the hook of time shifts so hot right now in Hollywood. From Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti crushing endless wedding beers for infinity in Palm Springs to the wiggy “temporal pincer moves” and inverted entropy of Tenet, it’s like Ned Ryerson is green lighting every other project in Tinseltown. And for Boss Level, he green lighted a doozy. Directed and co-written by Joe Carnahan, this version of the Groundhog Day riff puts former special operations soldier Roy (Frank Grillo, who has become a Carnahan regular) in a repeating day scenario where a band of assassins are constantly trying to off him. This happens in the very first scene, in fact, when one of them is seen creeping into Ray’s apartment. “Can you imagine waking up every day with some random asshole like Mr. Good Morning here trying to hack you up with a machete?” Roy asks in voiceover as he sidesteps each blade thrust and body blow with ease. After all, he’s done this hundreds of times. Boss Level even employs a game screen cutaway to tell us the tally. This is “Attempt  079.”

The attempts on Roy’s life aren’t what he’s counting. Those happen in every iteration of his day, all of the time, and no matter how many assassins he kills, they always get to him. No, what he’s attempting is to live past 12:47pm, and hopefully contact his ex-wife Jemma (Naomi Watts), who is a research scientist at Dynow, a shady corporate facility run by the priggish Ventor (Mel Gibson). All manner of attempts are shown. The assassins, of varied gender, size, and eccentric calling card, sport assault rifles, grenade launchers, swords, IEDs — even some sort of speargun contraption. In fact, they all feel imported wholesale from Carnahan’s cheeky 2006 bullet fest Smokin’ Aces. Jemma is working on something in her lab, a centrifugal behemoth, and the sour-faced Ventor with his cadre of private security goons is clearly the big bad jefe of its title. But Boss Level isn’t concerned with its own temporal specifics, and doesn’t delineate Ventor’s evil plan beyond vague gestures toward world domination. It would rather dwell on tough, resourceful, and pugnacious Roy, who gets a new guy every time he runs out, the better to try and beat the assassins again.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The dying-to-live again montages of Edge of Tomorrow surface here, too — they make up most of Boss Level, in fact. When Roy finally manages to cross the 12:47 rubicon, it’s like Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt getting all of the way to the kingfish alien at the dam. Carnahan and Grillo also have a little fun with their own narrative together. When Roy is asked “Are you like that guy from Taken, who has a particular set of skills?” he LOLs, and says Neeson is a fake tough guy as opposed to his real thing. Grillo co-starred with Neeson in Carnahan’s gripping 2011 survival thriller The Grey.

Performance Worth Watching: Frank Grillo usually plays a tough guy, and one of his signature moves has become his particular deployment of the word “Pal.” When he says it, it’s both casual and coarse, a threat limned with informal familiarity. In Grillo’s hands, “Pal” is like the way Harrison Ford crooks his pointed finger determinedly at somebody in every single damn movie he’s in. “You find this man!”

Memorable Dialogue: “Sometimes, I manage to kill them,” Roy’s voiceover says of the assassins hunting him. “But it doesn’t matter. They always find me, and eventually they take me out.” Cue another supercut of Roy being eviscerated by a gatling gun, or beheaded by a Chinese saber. (That particular death blow happens more than once.)

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Rather than agonizing over the mechanics of its time loop framework, Boss Level joins the action with the trigger already pulled. It doesn’t bang its head against the wall trying to solve a Christopher Nolan-like math problem until it doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going. Roy admits he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going, and immediately gets to dispatching some killers with his fighting skills and roaring away from other bad guys in a beefy, rust-brown Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat convertible that does not seem to be a regular production model. In that sense, and in its disembodied narration and video game screen cutaways, Boss Level channels the gonzo, surreal hedonism of the Crank films. Nolan can keep his turnstiles and reverse munitions. Roy is going to keep it old school, even if he doesn’t know what school he’s even in.

What makes all of this fun is Grillo, an actor who has steadily built on his meathead action role appearances to become a dependable, compelling lead. He’s often irascible, and irritable, but he broadens that single dimension with notes of warm sarcasm and even tenderness. (Grillo was a big reason why The Purge: Anarchy had any kind of heart.) Saddled with the temporal mystery of Boss Level, Grillo’s Roy just grins and bears it, and isn’t even phased when his big plan to foil Ventor goes sideways. No problem, just hire Michelle Yeoh to train you in swordsmanship. Every time Boss gets a little thin narratively, Grillo is there with a wry smile, one liner, or punctuating gear change in his convertible Hellcat to shift the movie back into freewheeling Go! position.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Boss Level is an explosive hoot of time loop mumbo jumbo that only cares about its temporal niceties for as long as it takes to get to the next shootout, car chase, or, yes, supercut of its hero being beheaded. It’s outrageous. Just go with it.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Boss Level on Hulu