A Perfectly Cast Mel Gibson Oozes Evil as a Cigar-Smoking Villain in the Clever 2020 Groundhog Day Variation Boss Level
Welcome to the latest entry in The Great Catch-Up. It’s a column where patrons of this site’s perpetually struggling Patreon account vote for which relatively important movie I’ve inexplicably never seen I should watch and write about. This latest poll pitted winner Boss Level against the lesser known and just plain lesser Mel Gibson movies Hot Seat, Last Looks, Dangerous and On the Line, which I also wrote about, just for fun.
Groundhog Day was not the first time-loop movie, but it so defined the subgenre that it’s damn near impossible to watch a time-loop movie without thinking about it.
There are not many perfect movies. Perfection is nearly impossible to achieve, particularly with something with as many tricky variables as a motion picture. Groundhog Day is perfect. It’s one of the greatest American films of any genre.
Groundhog Day defined and perfected the time loop movie to the point that its title can be used as an effective shorthand for the entire field.
It’s consequently damn near impossible to talk about Joe Carnahan’s fiendishly clever 2020 science fiction Boss Level without referencing Harold Ramis’ masterpiece of comic craftsmanship and casual philosophy, and pointless to even try.
Boss Level isn’t the first movie to give Groundhog Day an action spin. Carnahan follows in the footsteps of both the beloved Bill Murray vehicle and 2014’s critically acclaimed The Edge of Tomorrow, which found Tom Cruise reliving the same damn day over and over and over again, during which he dies repeatedly. To borrow the movie’s tagline, it’s live, die, repeat for the cursed hero.
Cruise’s protagonist acquires new knowledge each day that allows him to progress toward finding a way out of his peculiar predicament. A similar dynamic is at play with Roy Pulver, a badass retired Delta Force soldier played by Frank Grillo in what should have been a star-making performance.
We begin not at the beginning but rather somewhere in the middle. Grillo’s cursed super-soldier has been reliving the day he died for months. It’s a day that he has come to know on a granular level because he keeps experiencing it over and over again, with minor variations because he can remember all of the previous times he lived and died that awful day and is learning how to survive for longer and longer durations.
Our quick-witted hero doesn’t know why a battalion of colorful assassins out of a Tarantino knockoff like Carnahan’s own Smoking Aces want to murder him, he just knows that he is a marked man who has to cheat death dozens of times in a span of mere hours just to get an opportunity to die all over again.
It’s a uniquely unfortunate situation, but it’s also an enormous pain in the ass. Over his months upon months of reliving the same dispiritingly eventful day, our hero has become very good at eluding the seemingly limitless number of crazed killers out to murder him, but not good enough to avoid dying not long after noon.
Roy is very good at staying alive against impossible odds, but not to the point that he doesn’t end up perishing violently all the same, frequently by quite literally losing his head.
If you enjoy movies in which heads are violently divided from bodies, you’ll dig Boss Level because it is head and shoulders above the competition in that regard and many others.
Roy has endured torments of the damned. So he’s entitled to have a little fun en route to the inevitable violent demise. Since he’ll never have to worry about hangovers or developing an addiction, he can get sloppy drunk on the kind of high-shelf liquor he’d never be able to afford in a different context.
The handsome super-soldier hooks up with a flirtatious, clearly buzzed beauty he picks up at a bar before his day descends into one long, invariably doomed quest for survival with seemingly the whole world out to kill him.
I’m writing about Boss Level because it costars Mel Gibson in the theatrical, larger-than-life villain role of Colonel Clive Ventor, the malevolent boss of Jemma Wells (Naomi Watts), Roy’s ex and the mother of his son Joe (Frank’s real-life son Rio).
It’s the kind of role Gibson might have ended up playing even if his crazed, very public racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism hadn’t nearly tanked his career.
Speaking of anti-Semitism, I was only moderately surprised to learn that super-agent Ari Emmanuel, the brother of the former Chicago mayor, is one of Mark Wahlberg’s agents.
Emmanuel is also, funnily enough, the man who led the movement to purge Mel Gibson from the movie business when the drunk driving/taped harassment kerfluffle.
The inspiration for Ari Gold on Entourage somehow found it in his heart to forgive Gibson. That “gracious” move also benefited him and his client Mark Wahlberg (Gibson’s costar in post-disgrace vehicles Daddy’s Home 2 and Father Stu and the star of the Gibson-directed upcoming thriller Flight Risk) professionally and financially.
Emmanuel famously insisted that “standing up against bigotry and racism is more important than money” before deciding that, actually, money might be more important than standing up to bigotry and racism after all.
I do not care for Gibson as a person. As a Jew, I find his rabid anti-Semitism concerning. As a human being, the words he screamed at the mother of his child about hoping that she would get sexually assaulted are seared into my brain. Unlike Emmanuel, I do not stand to profit from the industry forgiving Gibson.
Yet I will be the first to concede that Gibson is fantastic in Boss Level, playing a cigar-smoking, larger-than-life military monster prone to intricately worded monologues and erudite threats.
It’s a juicy role for a movie star. Gibson delivers a real star turn. After a seeming eternity in straight-to-streaming purgatory, he clearly relishes the opportunity to play a real character in a real movie with real production values and real costars.
Though its hero’s life is predictable in surreal ways, Boss Level is full of welcome surprises. These include Mad TV and The Three Stooges funnyman Will Sasso, who delivers a shockingly convincing, subtly menacing performance as the head of security for the sinister organization Gibson leads. Sasso makes for a convincing, compelling henchman with terrific chemistry with the Lethal Weapon star.
I was surprised to learn that Watts is the female lead because she honestly seems like too big of a star to have a supporting role in a modestly budgeted Hulu original.
It’s not a big role but it is important. Roy’s guilt over not being there for his ex and a son who does not know he’s his father provides an emotional element that keeps Boss Level from being merely clever.
Carnahan fought for Grillo to play the lead. The film plays to his strengths as a martial artist, actor, and movie star.
In that respect, his performance reminded me of Jason Statham’s career-best turn as the star of Crank and Crank: High Voltage. That constitutes high praise from someone who considers the Neveldine/Taylor masterpieces apexes of action cinema.
The situations here are so ridiculous, surreal, excessive, and intentionally, deliberately over-the-top that Grillo doesn’t need to add to the craziness. Like Statham in Crank, he gets huge laughs through his deadpan underreaction to a world that starts out crazy and just gets nuttier and nuttier.
As in Groundhog Day, Roy discovers that becoming a better human being and strengthening his bond with loved ones constitutes an even better use of his time than trying and failing to cheat death.
Michelle Yeoh rounds out a surprisingly impressive supporting cast with a small but crucial role as a master swordswoman who only has one day to teach Roy all she knows. Thankfully, one day is all he ever has.
I’ve seen Grillo play small roles in big movies, including MCU movies where he plays Brock Rumlow / Crossbones, and big roles in small movies, including some of Willis’ final schlockfests.
Boss Level turned me into a Grillo fan. It’s a perfect vehicle and a distinctly satisfying motion picture that ranks among the best video game movies because it’s not based on any one video game but has a video game aesthetic that calls to mind Edgar Wright’s revered Scott Pilgrim Versus the World.
The Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patrons who voted for Boss Level sensed that it was the gem of the many movies Grillo has made in the past half-decade. In 2021 alone, he starred in eight movies: No Man’s Land, Cosmic Sin (opposite Bruce Willis), Body Brokers, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Ida Red, The Gateway, Copshop (which reunited the action hero with Boss Level director Carnahan) and This Is the Night.
Grillo sure does make a lot of movies, but here he’s not just a prolific veteran: he’s a goddamn movie star.
Nathan got life-changing dental implants, but they’re crazy expensive, so he set up a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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