The Boys is a bloody manic mayhem dream show

When the screen adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys comic books premieres on Amazon Prime Video on July 26th, fans will likely notice a lot of changes to the story. But creator and showrunner Eric Kripke (Supernatural, Timeless) has crafted an adaptation that honors the comics while also giving new audiences access to a story that comes at viewers hard and fast.

The Boys is set in an America where superheroes are heavily commodified and merchandised. They’re brand names. They’re not just saving the world; they’re starring in movies, splashed across billboards for theme parks, endorsing everything from shoes to cereal, and marketed within an inch of their lives.

At the center of their world is Vought International, a multibillion-dollar corporation that employs more than 200 superheroes, managing their schedules, lives, and images. Like any business, Vought is looking to make money, and it will protect its investments at any cost. As The Boys reveals early, there’s certainly a cost because superheroes are dicks.

Spider-Man’s “With great power comes great responsibility” ideology seems to have completely missed The Boys’ heroes who don’t take much responsibility for the damage they cause. They catch criminals and save people under Vought’s management, but they consider collateral damage — like, say, obliterating a random bystander on the way to stop bank robbers — as just the cost of doing business. Vought has entire PR and clean-up teams to deal with such situations, so all the outside world sees is the good the supers do.

But cover-ups only go so far, and every once in a while, the façade breaks. In the case of The Boys, the cracks come in the form of two people: mild-mannered tech salesperson Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) and Starlight, aka Annie January (Erin Moriarty), the newest member of Vought’s premiere superhero squad, The Seven. While their lives couldn’t be more different, Hughie and Annie become the epicenter of a superhero shake-up that could bring Vought down.

Enter Billy Butcher (Karl Urban). Billy Butcher hates Vought. He hates superheroes. He wants the entire superhero business to burn to the ground, and he’s made it his mission to punish heroes who step out of line. He’s crass, he’s sexist, he’s vulgar, he’s violent, and he lies about pretty much everything. He isn’t looking to save the world. His vendetta is personal. But his goal to take down Vought wins Hughie to his side, which quickly pulls Hughie in over his head.

When I spoke to Kripke in December 2018, he told me The Boys is a “hard R, it’s a big difference from anything I’ve done before. But anyone who knows me knows that I have a super filthy sense of humor… I’ve never been able to express it to the public… My parents are gonna be horrified.” That’s certainly possible because he really does shoot for the moon in making The Boys transgressive and boundary-pushing. It’s a gory show, with blood and brains and severed arms and brutal fights.

The adaptation cleaves hard from the source material when it comes to graphic adult material like sex, nudity, assault, and torture. No one is spared in the bloodbath. And yet there’s a relatability to the Boys, from Billy Butcher’s need for revenge on the supers over his wife’s death to Hughie’s similar fight for justice after one of the supers kills his girlfriend by running through her. Other members of the group, including Frenchie, Mother’s Milk, and The Female, have their own reasons for wanting to fight the superheroes or take down Vought itself. Their violent missions feel like a righteous cause taken to the extreme, unlike the supers’ casual brutality.

It would have been easy to turn The Boys into a misogynistic splatterfest, but Kripke navigates around that trap while also dropping in a few elements that add equality to the picture. Sure, Billy Butcher calls the Statue of Liberty a “slit” and throws the word “cunt” around like confetti, but multiple men strip down for the show — including Karl Urban and another character who goes full-frontal — while there’s no corresponding female nudity. The contrast is rare enough to feel refreshing, and the nudity in the script isn’t sexualizing the characters. It feels like a polite nod to the female gaze, rather than anything specifically gratuitous.

More significantly, The Boys grapples directly with the #MeToo era in a plot thread where Starlight is sexually assaulted by one of The Seven as part of her “initiation,” but she finds a way not just to fight back, but to claim her own agency among the group. The men also get their illuminating, human moments. Mother’s Milk is out kicking superhero ass, but he’s also maintaining a strong, loving relationship with his wife, whether it’s taking her calls no matter how inopportune the time, or bringing home lobster for dinner. Like Frenchie’s nurturing, philosophical side and Hughie’s vulnerability, these human details make the characters more rounded and the violence seem more personal.

Kripke does seem to delight in just how meteorically out-there he can get with The Boys. Aside from the general mayhem caused by superhero powers used without restraint, the psychological side of The Boys gets plumbed with reckless abandon. From a super crushing a man’s skull as she orgasms to another super’s paraphilic infantilism fetish, Kripke uses extreme moments to build the story.

It helps that he’s chosen a cast that grounds so much of The Boys’ wildness in some sort of understandable reality. Elisabeth Shue is a standout as Vought’s senior VP of hero management, Madelyn Stillwell. A genderbend from the comics’ James Stillwell, Madelyn is an enjoyable subversion of Shue’s likability factor in Adventures in Babysitting or The Karate Kid as a younger woman and more recently on CSI. Madelyn is beautiful, charming, supportive, and smart. But her job at Vought is all about branding, and she’s aware that image is everything. Underneath her pearlescent smile, she’s a keen hunter who’s willing to do whatever it takes to secure her power at Vought.

Billy Butcher is a right bastard, but Urban balances a maniacal glee with a wounded determination that keeps him human even when he’s planning to blow people up. Urban may be broadly familiar these days as Dr. Leonard McCoy in the Star Trek film reboots, but longtime fans know he can just as easily play villains, like Vaako in Chronicles of Riddick, or disillusioned good guys like John Kennex in Almost Human, and he’s handled more than his fair share of action.

And Jack Quaid (the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan) brings an intriguing mix of insecure intelligence, charm, and unexpressed rage to Hughie Campbell. As the entry point for the series, the character being introduced to a new world of violence, Quaid’s Hughie has to be likable while still being a doormat. Simon Pegg is perfect as Hughie’s dad, offering an idea of how Hughie became those things. On the other side of the spectrum, Antony Starr’s Homelander is vibrating with menace and fanatical belief. Other cast members play their roles in big, forceful ways without going too far over-the-top, which is an impressive feat in a show that’s so close to over-the-top most of the time.

Lucky for The Boys, it’s in the right hands. Kripke and executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have a knack for pushing right up to the line of outrageousness without going over. Kripke has assembled veteran TV directors like Daniel Attias (The Wire), Philip Sgriccia (Supernatural), and Stefan Schwartz (The Americans) alongside newer talents like Jennifer Phang (The Expanse) to help bring out the glitz and grime of the original Boys comics. Like Ennis’ Preacher, The Boys also takes more than its fair share of shots at Christianity and organized religion, especially with the superhero character of Ezekiel. But the story also delves into Starlight’s faith. Christianity is part of her superhero identity and marketing, and she finds strength in it when everything she thought she knew about superheroes comes crashing down.

Filled with blasphemy, guts, sex, and heartfelt emotion, The Boys is going to alienate some viewers. It’s deliberately pushing boundaries. It’s crass, it’s bloody, it’s brutal, and it’s got a raunchy sense of humor. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun. And for viewers who love a little anarchy and bedlam in their superhero drama, it hits all the right notes.

The Boys premieres on Amazon Prime Video on July 26th.