Dallas Fisher

I cannot believe it has been almost a decade since Boots Riley’s last, and first, feature film in Sorry to Bother You. Even though it’s been that long, and I’ve only had one viewing of the movie, it has stuck with me all the same. I Love Boosters will stick with me too, just for different reasons.

This is a cool ass movie, mostly. I think it’ll be hard to find a cooler cast than this one for the rest of the year. I’m not going to list off everyone involved, but I can’t believe we got Keke Palmer, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, and Don Cheadle in the same movie. Cheadle shocked me when he showed up on screen and Palmer/Poulter are on heaters that I forever want more of. Then there’s Stanfield. He is someone I’ll always wish was a leading man as his presence always brings a weighted energy that will never be diluted. We needed way more of him here and maybe less of him being lost from the plot. While we’re talking about the cast, I will say I felt a lot of the characters were suffocating to the point where it took me out. A lot of people fighting for screen time also didn’t help the cause. Sometimes less is more, and that’ll be the lesson I got from this.

Other than the cast, the costuming obviously has to be mentioned in the cool department. This is one of the very few times where it felt like effort was put into everyone on screen. Sure, principal actors had the access to a top tier wardrobe, but so did every single background actor. I love a cohesive set and this one worked so well. The vibrancy of every color jumps off the screen and actually brings meaning to what is being worn. Major props to this movie for making it feel like an alternative real life world where everyone is just on the same page when it comes to fashion and colors, just like The Cat in the Hat.

My favorite thing about Boosters though, the set design. As I get older my eyes and brain are drawn more to this aspect of filmmaking. For the first time ever, a set has made me audibly burst out laughing. The class war aspect of this is shown off in subtle and not so subtle ways, with angles and colors once again bringing its forces to light. It was delightful when these set pieces came into play and made things humorous in a way that was almost slapstick without feeling hacky.

From a story side of things, a very important aspect to movie consuming, I was checked out once we hit the twenty minute show time, roughly. It felt very much like something I had seen before, just emptier. Adding new elements of sci-fi, in already typical Boot’s fashion only two movies in, I don’t think is for me. The whole time I was waiting for the weirdness to hit and when it did I was already hoping it wouldn’t have gone that way. It’s as if this was the dozenth time that the Trojan horse method was tried, and it had me asking, “Can things be too weird?”

I Love Boosters never stops being itself. It’s creative, visually striking, but disconnected. I never judge others for how they feel about movies, but I’m semi-judging myself for how I reacted to this movie. Was it my fault for starting this at 9:30 p.m. after working 10 hours and working out as a 33 year old? Probably. There is a lot to love here even if I found its two dimensional world missing the magic outside of the “below the line” categories. A stacked cast sure does its damndist to fashion a movie into something forceful.

I Mostly Liked Boosters

6.8/10