The Boys Presents: Diabolical Offers Wild Superpowered Raunch As We Wait for Season 3: Review
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The post The Boys Presents: Diabolical Offers Wild Superpowered Raunch As We Wait for Season 3: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: Animated spinoff anthologies for popular nerd properties are all the rage, it seems; hot off the back of Star Wars Visions a mere few months ago, Prime Video’s hit superhero satire The Boys gets one in the form of The Boys Presents: Diabolical.
Taking inspiration, presumably, from their other blood-soaked comic book adaptation Invincible, here we’ve got eight distinct stories, with eight distinct animation styles, telling stories in and around the show’s world of corporate-sponsored (and created) superheroes, and the intestine-strewn trails they leave in their wake.
Across eight Adult Swim-sized stories, the anthology peeks into the following tales of superpowered mayhem:
• A Tex Avery-style silent caper with a Vought scientist chasing down the laser-eyed baby of his dreams;
• The residents of a juvenile home for teens with disappointing superpowers scheme to kill their parents;
• Billy Butcher (this time voiced by Jason Isaacs) gets The Seven’s resident drug pusher to mess up their supply;
• An average-looking couple use superpowered body lotion to make themselves look like their idealized selves (and keep their social media accounts buzzing);
• A young woman (Awkwafina) takes Compound V and befriends her sentient turd;
• The daughter of a Black superhero power couple calls on her parents’ old nemesis to put the fight back in their flagging marriage;
• An elderly man (Randall Duk Kim) steals Compound V to save his dying wife;
• Homelander (Antony Starr) goes on his first morally-grey mission for Vought, with Black Noir hot on his heels to keep him in line.
Cartoon Violence: In a television landscape committed to deconstructing the superhero mythos (see: Watchmen, Peacemaker, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow yeahIseadit), Eric Kripke’s adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s bestselling comic series The Boys stands out for its almost-juvenile preoccupation with raunch, gore, and heaps of profanity.
Yes, it’s got a surprising amount to say about the real-world impact of superpowered beings in a modern world (namely, that corporations would immediately try to make money off them and turn them into brands/products), but it juggles that with a devious sense of humor, a high body count, and Verhoeven-movie volumes of blood.
As a palate-cleanser between seasons of the main show (Season 2 ended in October of 2020, and COVID has pushed Season 3 back to June of this year), Prime Video has provided this animated anthology with all the peaks and valleys you’d expect from such an enterprise.
Some of the shorts are absolutely fantastic, playing with the trappings of the show’s world to create funny or heartbreaking stories that stand on their own. Others? Well, let’s just say 12 minutes is often not enough time to tell a story.
The series starts off pretty slow in its front half with “Laser Baby’s Day Out,” the Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen-penned romp that plays as if “Duck Amuck” were directed by Peter Jackson in the ’90s. Following a Vought scientist who falls in love with a superpowered baby with deadly laser eyes (a gag we already saw used to great effect in Season 1 of The Boys), it’s cute in concept but wears thin quickly.
After all, between Invincible and the aforementioned live-action appearance, there’s not much to do with the laser-baby farce, except for a few marginally-clever gags and some superficial aesthetic reminders of old Looney Tunes shorts.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical (Prime Video)
Justin Roiland and Ben Bayouth’s “An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents” gives us a Rick & Morty-fied jaunt in the Boys universe, with Compound V recipients who get disappointing (or downright tragic) powers: The woman who is completely intangible, the man with a boombox head that only plays Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be With You”, a kid with tits for eyeballs, you get the picture. It’s maybe the most front-to-back hilarious short in the anthology, tinged with that interpersonal pathos that permeates Rick & Morty. It’s a winner.
Less successful, though, are the ones that try to keep us grounded in the world of the show itself, funnily enough; comic creator Ennis pens “The Pusher,” which ends up feeling a bit boring and perfunctory save for a particularly gnarly gag in the climax involving a super-fast supe hopped up on drugs punching his way clean through another member of The Seven.
And the closer, “One Plus One Equals Two,” entertains mostly in that it teases the idea that Homelander (Antony Starr) wasn’t a total sociopath before we met him in the show; instead, he was driven to it by necessity and the cold-blooded orders of Vought executives. Basically, the closer Diabolical gets to just feeling like it’s aping Invincible, the less interesting it gets.
Turd in the Punchbowl: But put Compound V in the hands of writers and animators who contrast the buckets of blood with an unexpected sweetness, and Diabolical manages to shine a little brighter. Take “Boyd in 3D,” a small-scale romance about two people who internalize the vanity and validation social media provides and projects it onto their bodies and their own relationships. It’s slight and unexpectedly grounded, even if it ends with an unnecessarily cruel twist.
Awkwafina pens (and stars in!) “BFFs,” probably the cutest of the bunch, styled after shojo anime and following a young girl who forms an inseparable bond with a literal piece of shit. Aisha Tyler’s “Nubian v. Nubian” is a decent enough lark, playing with the tried-and-true tropes of the married superhero couple without really innovating on them all that much; still, Tyler’s got a flair for quick-witted dialogue, and John DiMaggio is a hoot as the Nubians’ Vought-scripted nemesis, a miserable middle-aged hawkman with hammers for hands named Groundhawk.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical (Prime Video)
But the most surprising entry is easily “John and Sun-hee,” which can best be described as Up meets Akira — a tale of an elderly man trying to do everything he can to buy another day with his wife, who’s in the hospital dying of terminal cancer. Steve In Chang Ahn’s beautiful, hand-drawn animation keeps the violent brief of The Boys‘ world, this time amplified by the cosmic, emotive trappings of Korean horror.
And at the center of it all, it uses a goofy superpowered elixir to externalize a woman’s battle with cancer, and a man’s struggle with saying goodbye to the woman he loves. Get ready to be shocked to see this short was penned by, of all people, Andy Samberg… if your eyes aren’t too dusty to read the ending credits.
The Verdict: Paradoxically, The Boys Presents: Diabolical succeeds best when it runs away from the adolescent antics of its source material and takes bigger conceptual swings. Set a self-contained romantic tragedy or social-media parable in the margins of the world? Yes, please! Try to continue the adventures of established characters in the same-old universe we’ve been watching? Not so much.
Such is the fate of so many of these anthologies; some are just going to inevitably work better than others. For a good time, skip to “An Animated Short…,” “Boyd in 3D,” “BFFs,” and “John and Sun-Hee.” But really, at a total runtime of two hours, Diabolical will hardly waste your time.
Where’s It Playing? The Boys Presents: Diabolical summons an army of sentient turds and swarms on Amazon March 4th.
Trailer:
The Boys Presents: Diabolical Offers Wild Superpowered Raunch As We Wait for Season 3: Review
Clint Worthington
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