Happy Death Day did time-loop horror. Palm Springs did time-loop rom-com. Edge of Tomorrow implemented it into action/sci-fi. Heck, even Doctor Strange gave us a time-loop superhero. Now Boss Level purports to do a more straightforward action movie with a time-loop conceit—in theory replicating the kind of rote learning found in all those movies, not to mention Russian Doll; the cinematic well from which all these films draw, Groundhog Day; and videogames. Its failure to follow through on this promise, never fulfilling the potential of Frank Grillo’s lead role or its own over-the-top silliness, makes the mostly dull effort more of a grind than end-game content.
And director Joe Carnahan should know better. He’s worked with Grillo plenty (notably in The Grey, which makes the movie’s one-liner about Liam Neeson work all the better), showing an understanding of the actor’s abilities and a way with visceral action. So why is so much of Boss Level spent on side quests?
Roy (Grillo) wakes up each morning under attack. A man swings a machete at his head; a helicopter’s chain gun hovers outside his window. He waltzes through this ambush in one of the most satisfying scenes in the film, as the open-concept apartment allows the side-scrolling choreography to play out with satisfying expertise. His undercut coif’s plumage stays perfectly in place as he parries, blocks and dodges. Roy has done this before. A lot. He’s some kind of super soldier, made more super by coming back to the same moment whenever he dies. You know how this works. But instead of living solely in this loop—enhancing each cycle with new information organically—an extended flashback rips us out in order to give us exposition and subplots.
Not only is Roy mysteriously living in a time loop, he’s also estranged from his wife Jemma (Naomi Watts) and his son, who doesn’t even know Roy’s his father. Jemma works for a kind of vaguely evil, militarized super-science company that would make Hideo Kojima roll his eyes, led by Mel Gibson’s gruff Colonel. Gibson is the exact kind of villainous blowhard to deliver Big Bad soliloquies, one aspect of the movie that actually errs pretty close to videogame narratives (though that also applies to pretty much every sci-fi/superhero blockbuster). It’s obviously through something the Colonel and Jemma are up to that’s got Roy stuck, though for those of you looking to crack the code…well, Primer this ain’t. Instead, it’s a far more traditional bad-dad actioner in the vein of Neeson or Gerard Butler’s arms-length patriarchs proving their affection through accumulating a high body count. The time loop, while it offers a few moments of cleverness, rarely feels like more than the flavorful framing device of the week.
Carnahan and his co-writers (Chris and Eddie Borey) take out plenty of toys from the chest—a bizarre array of assassins, from a self-important swordfighter to a set of Black German twins wielding RPGs, that should be a hoot to watch be dismantled—but mostly leave them untouched in favor of playing house with the film’s tired familial substory. There’s barely enough plot to hold its dragging 86 minutes together, so why wouldn’t you just lean into the madness? Will Sasso is playing a heavy, but he never gets his due; Michelle Yeoh shows up for a mere moment, wasting a hell of a cameo; and Sheaun McKinney’s heroic injection of energy (as an amusingly annoying security tech expert) never gets to rise above NPC status—even when watching Grillo pull his own teeth.