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.

As the first female-led Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Captain Marvel is arriving in theaters under a heavy burden of expectations. Even after years of fans clamoring for a Black Widow standalone movie, it took a full decade and 20 MCU films for the franchise to produce a single movie with a woman protagonist. And it took the example of rival studio DC Entertainment releasing Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman to both critical and monetary success. That gives Captain Marvel the triple challenge of living up to past MCU films, proving a female-led movie can make the company money, and squaring off against one of DC’s biggest hits.

But even without the challenge of breaking new representational ground for the MCU, Captain Marvel is facing sky-high expectations because of the MCU films immediately preceding it. Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi brought a new irreverence to the MCU, while also lining up Thor, Hulk, and Doctor Strange for Avengers: Infinity War. Then came Black Panther, in which director Ryan Coogler took Marvel fans deep into the story and culture of the African nation of Wakanda, breaking box office records and giving Marvel its first Oscar-winner. That film dovetailed neatly into Avengers: Infinity War, which linked together 18 previous films, made $2 billion worldwide, and eradicated half the universe’s population. Even Ant-Man and the Wasp, the first Marvel film with a female character in its title, felt like it was queuing up expectations for Captain Marvel, and for the fast-approaching Infinity War sequel Avengers: Endgame.

After all of that, Captain Marvel is in the unenviable position of having to introduce a new character to the MCU, lay out her origin story, tie her in with the current MCU timeline, create backstories for several previously established characters, and set up even more significant elements for Avengers: Endgame. But Captain Marvel mostly bears the weight of those expectations. It rises to the occasion with strong performances and with its directors’ willingness to slow down and take their story seriously, balancing humor, action, and exposition in a carefully calibrated package.

Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is initially introduced as Vers, a Starforce Agent for the alien Kree race. Vers isn’t a character from the original Captain Marvel comics, but Marvel readers may recognize her fellow Starforce members: Korath the Pursuer (Djimon Hounsou, Guardians of the Galaxy), Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan, Crazy Rich Asians), Bron-Char (Rune Temte, The Last Kingdom), Att-Lass (Algenis Pérez Soto, Sugar), and their leader Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). Vers has powerful Kree abilities: super strength, physical endurance, and the ability to shoot blasts of energy from her fingertips. But she can’t remember how she got those powers, or what her life was like before the Kree found her and brought her to their homeworld of Hala.

When Starforce is assigned to recover a spy, Carol ends up in the hands of the Skrulls, a race of shape-shifting aliens at war with the Kree. The Skrull leader Talos (Ready Player One villain Ben Mendelsohn) has one goal, and he’s willing to root around in Vers’ memories to get it: the Lightspeed Engine, which could turn the tide of the war in the Skrulls’ favor. But Talos’ trip through Vers’ memory unlocks visions of her past as Carol Danvers, which lead her to planet C-53 (Earth) in the 1990s. There, she gets the attention of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, this time with both eyes intact) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg, with more hair than he has in The Avengers or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). Danvers and Fury’s sarcastic verbal dueling becomes a highlight of the film, as Vers steps out of a highly advanced civilization into a world of pay phones and strip malls while wearing a Starforce uniform and talking about shape-shifting aliens.

The 1990s nostalgia is strong in Captain Marvel. Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden weave the futuristic elements of Carol’s story into the retro time period through everything from clothes to cars to music. Fleck has said music was the first thing they concentrated on during pre-production by creating a playlist that wound up including songs like No Doubt’s “I’m Just A Girl,” Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” and R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.” Much like with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and their classic rock anthem mixtapes, Captain Marvel uses the soundtrack as a kind of running gag, driving audience nostalgia while playing up the humor of adding familiar songs to alien situations.

Captain Marvel’s biggest strength lies in its central relationship between Carol and Air Force pilot Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch). Like Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, Carol and Maria are bonded by a shared past and a deep friendship, even if Carol can’t remember it. Captain Marvel is the rare Marvel character without even a token love interest, but Larson has described Carol and Maria’s friendship as “the love of the movie… This is the love lost, this is the love found again, this is the reason to continue fighting and to go to the ends of the Earth.”

But bringing across that level of love, confusion, and commitment requires a lot from Larson, who’s essentially playing three roles in this film: Vers, Carol, and Captain Marvel. Each has her own journey and challenges, and each feels rounded-out and relatable. Larson’s ferocity in the action scenes and her quiet pain in deeper moments all feel organic. The story feels jumbled at times, but her strong, relatable performance provides the connecting thread.

The action can be less convincing, however. Brie Larson reportedly trained for four and a half hours a day over the course of 10 weeks to prepare for her fight scenes in Captain Marvel, but apart from a close-up early sparring match between Larson and Law, most of the combats are edited in such a choppy, jump-cut-focused fashion, it’s hard to see what the actors are physically capable of bringing to the table, and it rarely feels like they’re actually executing the moves.

None of which keeps the villain from largely stealing the movie. Even in full pointy-eared, green-skinned Skrull latex and costume, Mendelsohn as Talos is dangerous and charming, even sexy. He seems to be having the time of his life in the role, and it’s compelling no matter how much damage and destruction he causes. Marvel’s difficulties in creating memorable, relatable villains have been well-documented, and the problem has gradually improved over time, with adversaries like Erik Killmonger and Thanos bringing personality and principle to their roles, rather than just naked, purposeless evil. Talos joins their ranks as a villain with a meaningful purpose. (Though he’s still periodically upstaged by Goose, a cat consciously set up to be an immediate audience favorite.)

The one hurdle Captain Marvel doesn’t entirely clear comes in its story execution. Its primary narrative, around Vers / Carol / Captain Marvel and her voyage of self-discovery, falls together well, following Marvel’s usual patterns of drama and humor and rising and falling action. But the story gets trickier when Captain Marvel has to pull together elements of both the MCU past and future. The Kree, already seen as villains in Guardians of the Galaxy and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., are portrayed as heroes here. In Guardians, Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) was a madman hellbent on destruction, and viewers may have a hard time wrapping their heads around his placement in Captain Marvel. Marvel stalwarts may appreciate the way some puzzle pieces slot together, but more casual moviegoers may find the information dumps and the film’s many seemingly unrelated or unjustified elements daunting and confusing.

But the filmmakers don’t shy away from the complexity of their story. Charged with setting up Captain Marvel as a necessary element to counteract Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, they give her a rich backstory and a believable motivation. Captain Marvel sometimes feels overstuffed on story elements, but each of those individual elements feels important and meaningful, from the extended flight scene that marries humor and danger to the banter that has Fury laying out his entire history for Carol’s amusement. Some of it may drag a bit in isolation, but it largely feels necessary for the larger story.

Ultimately, Captain Marvel gets its many jobs done, and it looks pretty good doing it. As a first-shot representation movie, it isn’t as game-changing as Black Panther, and it isn’t as adventurous as Thor: Ragnarok. But it does deliver the girl-power narrative the MCU needed on a level to rival Wonder Woman, and not just by making Captain Marvel a powerful hero. It also makes her an admirable person, one with good friends and goals worth fighting for. And it firmly establishes Carol Danvers as one of Marvel’s mightiest superheroes, which is exactly what the Avengers will need in Endgame.