I could watch Homelander’s face for a thousand years. This is quite the moral quandary, considering his position as one of the most evil characters to have appeared on our TV sets in the past decade.
But it’s this, as well as the incisive jokes, spot-on cultural references and one-of-a-kind action sequences that make Prime Video’s The Boys so watchable, despite entering its fourth series with nearly the exact same premise as its first.
As has become customary, season four opens with a bang. We pick up with our gang of heroes – The Boys of the title – going undercover to take down political head popper Victoria Neuman
Just a quick catch up, Neuman is one of many nasty “supes”, aka superheroes, who possess deadly powers (like head-popping, which is as disgusting as it sounds), while The Boys, a ragtag team of criminals and weirdos, are trying to reign the supes in – and, in some cases, kill them.
This season, vice-presidential hopeful Neuman (a secret supe) is enemy number one. The Boys are trying to take her down before the election potentially puts her one head pop away from the presidency, but her abilities and alliance with Homelander are making it awfully difficult.
Meanwhile, Homelander, the sort of Superman gone wrong who we all know is the real enemy number one, is busy being his worst self. Except this season, he’s trying to optimise it. Tired of only hearing praise, he hires the smartest person in the world (also a supe) to tell him the hard home truths.
For all intents and purposes, season four is standard programming for The Boys. A mission to kill bad supes but not really up to it, a lot of gore, some of the grossest nudity you’ve ever seen on screen, Antony Starr delivering the most impressive facial impressions since Florence Pugh’s Midsommar frown – you know, the usual.
And yet somehow it still works. I don’t like gore and abhor toilet humour, but even I welcomed the return of The Boys with open arms like a mother reuniting with her unruly, absent child.
So, what’s different this time around? Season four goes heavy on the political storyline and Trump comparisons, which are at once on point (Homelander is on trial for a crime while involved in an election) and a little silly (said election is conveniently set for Jan 6th).
The gore is no more revolting than usual, though some of the disgusting bits feel slightly shoehorned in, like the showrunners know they have a reputation to live up to. For example, there’s a human centipede scene that clearly came out of a meeting room where the topic on the whiteboard was “grossest thing you can think of… that we haven’t done yet.”
It is, however, more gruesome than ever. Most of the violence and gore in The Boys is played for laughs, but there are a few scenes in this series that really test the limit of what’s watchable. This is perhaps an attempt to horrify an already-desensitised audience, amping up the psychological discomfort to the point where it can no longer be laughed off or brushed away. It succeeds in this.
On the flip side, there are some amazing lines, and this may be the funniest season yet. It might feel a little repetitive at times – such as the mandatory guilt spiral of one character per season: last series was Kimiko, this one’s Frenchie – but ultimately it’s so entertaining, you just forget about it. And like I said, I could watch Homelander’s face for a thousand years.
