I Love Boosters
review by Bobby Blakey
In 2018 director Boots Riley unleashed his excellent film Sorry to Bother You that smacked the status quo in the face. Now he is back with his latest film I Love Boosters featuring an impressive cast including Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, with Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore. Could this film be yet another unique story in Riley’s filmography or will it fail to make the steal?
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I Love Boosters follows The Velvet Gang, a crew of professional shoplifters led by aspiring designer Corvette who targets cutthroat fashion icon Christie Smith when she steals one of Corvette's designs. They plan to boost Smith's entire inventory but inadvertently spark a movement for retail and factory workers around the world. It's like community service.
I loved Sorry to Bother you and the insane directions it went. I wasn’t sure how off the rails this film was going to go, but the trailers do not prepare you for where it goes and that’s a great thing. The first act is exactly the story the trailer sets up and introduces us to all the characters and their places in this soon to be insane story. It’s a simple set up that works and makes for a fun heist like flick before things go somewhere else altogether.
I am going to navigate this review carefully as I don’t want to give anything away or even give you an idea of what they do here as that is part of its brilliance. It’s a visually vibrant film that doesn’t hold itself to any rules which helps to make it stand out and if you can embrace it then you are in for a strange fun journey, but it won’t work for everyone. The cast are all great with so many strange, weird looks and styles to make for a unique world vision. Each of them brings great performances that stand out and help to make this unique story work.
The film heads out of the standard ideal into an over-the-top bizarre science fiction film that I did not expect. There is a blend of animation at one point that kind of mimics stop motion, if that’s not what it is, that is weird and almost looks cheap but fits perfectly. It’s hard to say to much here without taking the experience from you, but I can say I enjoyed it more in a way I had not expected. Under the surface of the wacky film there is a social commentary that makes the film way deeper than you might expect in the direction it goes.
In addition to the film this release offers bonus content including a feature commentary with Boots Riley, never seen cast interviews, a “The Making of I LOVE BOOSTERS” documentary featurette, and a blooper reel.
Join the heist with Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters available now on digital and then on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD on September 22nd from NEON.