Boss Level 4K 2020 Ultra HD 2160p

The focus will be the story of a retired special forces veteran named Roy (Frank Grillo), caught in an endless time loop and forced to live the same day over and over again, which ends in his death. To get out of the endless stream of misery, the protagonist needs to find his killer, who is the main boss.

Boss Level 4K Review
Roy (Frank Grillo) wakes up to a sharp machete pointed over his head. An enraged killer is in front of him, an attack helicopter is outside his window, and everyone naturally wants him dead. With practiced movements he eliminates threats, but without much enthusiasm. After all, Roy is caught in a time loop and knows for sure - after these two there will be a dozen more killers. But how he ended up in this position, and why exactly they want to kill so many people, Roy has no idea. He only guesses that all this is somehow connected with his wife (Naomi Watts), who was working on some top-secret project under the supervision of a tough military man (Mel Gibson).

Roy tells the viewer about his situation with quips and cynical smirks in the first few minutes - "Boss Level" (or Boss Level in the original) kicks off from the get-go, hiding the exposition in jaunty monologues. At first, this seems like a win-win solution: yes, voice-over is considered a "low" gimmick, but in this case it saves you from even more of a truism: the obligatory time loop episodes where the hero first encounters a new reality and tries to get used to it. There's no procrastination here - director Joe Carnahan rushes right into the action, into the thick of it, into the whirlwind of explosions, shootouts and spectacularly severed heads.

Curiously, he has already used a similar dramaturgical device in "The Clash" - there the viewer first learns that Liam Neeson's character (who, incidentally, is remembered ironically in "The Day of the Kurk") was in a plane crash and found himself almost alone with the elements and hungry wolves, and then - about his personal trauma, adding an additional psychological dimension to the story of survival. Here, too, we first see Roy in his new reality and then gradually realize how he got there and what he must do. In "The Day of the Kurk," however, Carnahan does not do it as well: the hidden backstory keeps coming out in the form of flashbacks and other retardations. The speed picked up in the beginning is lost in the middle, the drive is gone, and the more slapstick drama creeps into the picture, the less space is left for simple dumb-ass hilarity. And Roy's amusing shenanigans after a while turn into a progressive explanation of what the viewer already sees on the screen without any explanation from the main character.

There are still plenty of funny jokes and successful physical gags, but Carnahan - whose last film was released back in 2014 - seems to have lost his touch over the years, lost his former flair for genre texture. He used to be able to balance between the aesthetics of octogenarian B-movies and postmodern narratives, to remain both a retrograde and a very modern director. "Boss Level" looks like a reminiscence from the past, the recent, unpretentious past, when you could still surprise someone with edgy dialogs, and good CGI was the privilege of only blockbusters (Carnahan's bad graphics are obviously not part of the artistic solution).

These are different times, and no one is surprised by action eccentricities: there's Kingsman, there's "Guns of Akimbo," there's, after all, the third "John Wick." "Boss Level" could play on the field of this sort of modern "bash," but for that it has too much of a sassy retrograde attitude (out of nowhere, ahem, an emerging '80s arcade game tournament) that separates it sharply from some Craig S. Zahler - who, I believe, genuinely thinks like an old-school grindhouse director. No, Carnahan's film is closer not to the old VHS action movies, but to the conditional "Project Power," the mid-budget misfires that Netflix produces in packs to fill up the library with something. In this sense, "Boss Level", for all its paradoxical lack of modernity, is quite a product of its time.