Opinion | Amazon’s superhero satire ‘The Boys’ gets even wilder
Superheroes find their reputations undone in a matter of retweets in ‘The Boys’.Premium
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Homelander is a superhero. He takes down terrorists, poses for movie posters and smiles from hoardings, with a stars-and-stripes cape and a distinctively Superman pose. Played by Antony Starr, he looks like Greg Kinnear if he’d been bred onsteroids, and in the second season of
The Boys—a resoundingly entertaining series on Amazon Prime Video—America’s most popular hero longs for a woman he had killed in season 1.
Elisabeth Shue plays Madeleine Starr, the aforementioned woman, and she duly shows up to comfort Homelander, to cradle his super head in her lap and let him lick milk off her fingers. This appearance feels oddly indulgent, neither a flashback nor a prolonged fantasy sequence in keeping with the show’s cruelly self-aware tone. Then, without warning, Shue grows a belly and turns into a man who has been holding his breath, another super-powered character called Doppelgänger who can change shape at will. Homelander is, pathetically, trying to soothe himself through roleplay. Now that’smuch more in character for a show where heroes argue inside the belly of a freshly massacred whale.