Welcome back to Movie Recaps. Today I will show you an Action,
Mystery, Sci-fi film from 2020, titled Boss Level.
Spoilers ahead! Watch out and take care. Roy Pulver is a retired Delta Force soldier
currently going through the one hundred thirty-nine version of this very same day.
He is stuck in a time loop that resets every time he dies, and he has gone through it so many times,
he has already learned the day's pattern by heart. Every morning at seven am,
a man breaks into his apartment and tries to kill him and the woman he slept with, then
a helicopter with a gunman appears outside his window and shoots his apartment until explodes.
Roy knows exactly where and how to move to avoid all this, and jumps off the window to
land on a truck filled with sand, which he had missed twenty-two times before he started to
get it right. Then he hijacks a car and drives to escape two more assassins in a minivan - Roy
does not know their names, so he calls them Pam and Esmerelda. These women chase him and shoot
at him throughout the city, but Roy knows how to escape them as long as he does not get distracted
and remembers to dodge the bus. Since this time he does not, the day resets and restarts again. Only
little details change during each loop, totally dependant on what Roy decides or forgets to do.
Besides the guy at his apartment, the helicopter and Pam, there are other assassins like Guan-yin,
who usually kills him with a sword; Kaboom, a short man that plans a bomb on him;
Smiley, who likes to kill him by impaling him with a lance and tying him to the back of his trunk;
the German twins; and a guy that looks a lot like him so he calls him Roy Number Two.
Sometimes he manages to kill some of them, but in the end, it does not matter, the others find him
and kill him anyway. Roy thinks the one with the answers to explain what is going on is
his ex-wife, but when he calls her office, the one to pick up the phone is her boss, Colonel
Clive Ventor, who tells him she has died in an accident, but Roy believes he has killed her.
Sadly though, he never manages to live long enough to find out why. On the days he manages to escape
the bus and Pam, Roy makes it to Jake's diner, where he must hurry to take a seat at the bar or
the last spot will be taken by Dai Feng, a world champion swordmaster that Jake has a crush on.
Roy proceeds to get deeply drunk while listening to the man sitting next to him,
Dave, talk about internal security and conspiracy theories. At twelve forty-seven,
the assassins always find him and kill him right there in the middle of the diner,
which means Roy has never made it even a minute past this point. If he does not come to the diner,
then he just gets killed earlier: he has already tried as many alternate roads as possible.
As he is shot once again by every single one of the assassins, Roy remembers the day before
the time-loop started. He is visiting his ex-wife Jemma Wells at her workplace, Dynow Laboratories,
after she left him a message asking him to come over because her company is hiring. However, she
does not seem too interested in her resumé or to reconnect after not seeing each other in a while,
she just starts taking Roy's measurements and a sample of his hair, which draws blood when
she pulls it. While Ventor and his bodyguard Brett watch them through the security cameras, Roy asks
Jemma about this weird machine she is working on, which she claims can unmake all time and space,
and even destroy the planet if used improperly. Roy also brings up the matter of their son,
who does not know he is his father, he just thinks Roy's a family friend. Begging to be heard,
Roy tells Jemma he can accept having lost her when he chose work over her, but he deserves a chance
to be in his son's life. Their talk is suddenly interrupted by Brett, who reminds Jemma this is
a restricted area, but Jemma says she has got a special agreement with Ventor. When Roy tries
to give him his resumé, Brett says they are not hiring, which means Jemma lied, but she sends him
away before he could say more. Before Roy leaves the building, Jemma tells him she has sent him a
birthday present that is incredibly important for him to open and that he should remember "Osiris".
Meanwhile, Ventor does not like the fact Roy has seen and learned things about his experiments,
so he orders Brett to deal with him by hiring random assets instead of trained soldiers so
nobody can track the assassins back to them. Then he asks Jemma to come to his office and scolds her
for having broken security protocols by inviting Roy over. When night falls, Roy goes to a bar
and picks up a woman called Alice, who works as a dental hygienist. She is just one more woman in a
long line of conquests, and the bartender points out Roy will never be happy with these one-night
stands because he never stops thinking about his ex-wife. While Alice is in the bathroom, he gets
a call from Jemma, telling him she is about to do something drastic and she needs his help,
but Ventor cuts off their line before she can say more. Roy could tell Jemma sounded upset,
but he still chooses to go back to his place with Alice instead of trying to reach her again.
While Roy and Alice have fun together, Jemma puts Roy's hair and blood in a tube that she inserts
inside the machine she has been working on. Seeing this on the security cameras, Ventor decides she
has gone rogue and sends Brett after her. This was the last normal day Roy got to live before
the loop started. But now that he has revisited his memory of his conversation with Jemma,
he realizes he has never checked the birthday present she has sent her, so he finally opens the
package and finds a book titled "Iset and Osiris" with a note from Jemma on the back cover that says
time waits for no man. He is so distracted by the book that he forgets about taking the right steps
to avoid the assassins. He dies two more times before he manages to escape with the book thanks
to finding a button on the car he always hijacks that he has never noticed before. After pressing
it, the car starts going much faster, causing Roy to miss the exit that takes him to Jake's diner.
Instead, he ends up at the Underground Atlanta mall, where he sits down to read the book Jemma
left him. He does not understand what the story of Iset and Osiris has to do with anything,
but he interrupts his reading when he sees his son Joe buying something from an older kid.
When he realizes that he is the only family he has left now that Jemma is dead, he follows Joe into
an arcade where they hold esports tournaments. Every time he walks near a screen, he causes them
to glitch, but Roy does not notice this, he just approaches Joe and scolds him for ditching school.
He also asks him what he bought, but Joe shows him they are just cards, not any kind of illegal
substance. Then Roy invites him to lunch, and as soon as they leave the building, he notices it is
twelve fifty, the longest he has ever lived since the loops started. As he analyses what he has
done differently, he finally realizes they must have put a tracker on him, and the metal walls
of the diner and the underground location of the shopping mall have kept him safe. At that moment,
the assassins arrive and shoot Roy as he grabs Joe and puts himself between the bullets and his son,
dying as he tells him he is his father. When the day restarts once again, he asks the man
that has broken into his apartment about the tracker, but he will not tell him where it is.
Moments later, Roy arrives at the diner and goes straight to the bathroom so he can closely inspect
his body, going as far as putting fingers up his own rear, but he still does not find the tracker.
Remembering Dave knows all about this stuff, he asks him where he would hide a tracker,
and Dave suggests the teeth. This brings back a memory to Roy: Alice, the dental hygienist,
putting him to sleep on a dentist chair while Brett watches them - she had been part of their
trap all along. After getting more alcohol and pliers from Jake, Roy goes to the bathroom with
Dave and starts removing his teeth until he finds the tracker, only to be killed a second
later by Roy Number Two. When the day restarts, he interrogates Alice, who tells him she had been
paid by Brett to implant the tracker before she leaves. Roy follows the usual routine until he
makes it to Jake's diner, where he removes the tooth with the tracker and then takes it to an
abandoned building to use it as a trap. His plan works and Pam shows up, but she refuses to say
who hired her, so he kills her with her own gun, which used to belong to a certain Geman dictator.
Roy knows Jemma has put him in this for a reason, but since he can not go far back enough to save
her, everything is meaningless. The only thing he has left is revenge, so Roy has fun with
his newfound tracker-less freedom and kills all the assassins that have been chasing him. Using
the phone he stole from Kaboom, he talks to Brett and promises he will find him and Ventor as well.
Roy drives to the laboratories and tries to smash the door open with the car, but he just crashes
and is shot by Brett afterward. A series of loops start then where Roy keeps trying different plans
to sneak into Dynow, like sending his car with bombs and pretending to be Roy Number Two.
Stealing his ID does allow him to get inside, but once again, it takes him a few tries until
he manages to learn all the tricks to avoid the guards and security cameras. When he finally
manages to find a way to sneak some weapons with him, the guards are not a problem anymore, but his
next obstacle is Guan-yin, whose sword fighting skills are too good for him to stop her with
mere wallets. Sometimes, he does not die quickly enough from the sword wounds and Ventor finds him,
giving the same long, dense speech about his plans to reset history before killing him.
It is during one of these speeches that Roy learns the name of the project is the "Osiris Spindle",
and he realizes two things: Ventor does not know it is working, and Jemma has put him in
it on purpose so he could become Osiris and stop Ventor and his plans. Feeling empowered
after learning Jemma still believed in him, Roy starts a new series of loops with a new plan.
After going through the usual routine up to removing the tracker at the diner's bathroom,
he approaches Dai Feng and asks her for sword lessons, and she accepts to teach him because
she finds him intriguing. He trains with her through a good amount of loops until he is good
enough to beat her, and after thanking her for her lessons, he sneaks into Dynow again. This time,
he fights against Guan-yin with a sword instead of guns and easily stops all her moves. After
teasing her a bit by cutting off her ponytail, he stabs her with her own sword. Brett and Ventor
arrive then, but Brett dies quickly when Roy stabs him on the forehead with the sword.
He and Ventor begin to fistfight, and when Ventor tries to grab a gun, Roy recovers his sword and
nails Ventor's hand to the floor as he explains nobody should play god and rewrite history,
the past should be left as it is so we can learn from it. Ventor thinks those are big words coming
from an absent father and implies Joe may be in danger, which enrages Roy. After killing Ventor,
he gets back in his car and rushes to the mall, where he finds out he is too late: his son is
dead, and this probably has already happened many times during all the loops he has been through.
While he struggles against the police that does not let him come closer to see Joe's body,
a bright light appears on the horizon: it is the end of the world, just like Jemma had warned him.
Roy comes to the conclusion Jemma is dead because he left her and never called her back when she
asked for his help, and now their son is involved in this too. If the world is going to end anyway,
there is no point in doing anything, so Roy begins to spend the next few loops in an apathetic state,
allowing the assassins to kill him over and over. One morning, however, the violence finally
makes him snap out of it and he decides to take advantage of all the time he now has in his hands.
He returns to the mall and picks up Joe to spend the day together, playing video games and having
lunch - he does this every loop until the end of the world takes them and resets the day yet again.
He wants to tell Joe he is his father, but he is too afraid to do it. During loop two hundred
forty-nine, Roy brings up the subject of Jemma's work, and Joe reveals he talked to her early in
the morning after she did not return home. This shocks Roy, who always thought she was killed
during the night, so now he starts a new plan to see if he can save her. After resetting the day,
he sneaks back into the laboratories and shoots Ventor and Brett while demanding answers.
Brett confesses they had been trying to find out what she did to the Osiris Spindle,
because it seems she sabotaged it and now they can not control the chain reaction she started.
Ventor realizes Roy is able to sneak in because the Spindle is working, which means Jemma made
him the missing mass. When looking at the security cameras, Roy finds out the exact time of Jemma's
death: fourteen minutes after he wakes up. After shooting himself to restart the day,
Roy decides to try to save Jemma even if he only has fourteen minutes to do it. As always,
he kills the first assassin, but afterward, he makes the routine different by jumping directly
from the window and into the helicopter. The gunman is kicked off before Roy threatens the
pilot with a gun, ordering him to take him to Dynow as fast as possible. Once he arrives,
he takes the gunman's machinegun with him as he sneaks inside the building and uses it to kill all
the assassins that are waiting together outside the door. From the pile of bodies, he takes a gun
and Guan-yin's sword, and he shoots every guard on his way until he makes it to Jemma's laboratory,
where she is being attacked by Brett. Roy does not hesitate to kill both him and Ventor in
seconds before reuniting with Jemma, who asks him how many tries it took him to get her. He lies
and says it was only one, but Jemma sees the truth when he begins telling her all the things
he has learned about Joe after promising her he is safe and no assassins are going after their
kid. Jemma explains that there is no stopping the Spindle, only restarting it. She made the
missing mass inside the machine match Roy's DNA specifically, so if he enters the Spindle,
the day should reset for the last time and time would go back to normal, but she is not
one hundred percent sure of that - all this is just a theory since this is the first time she
managed to make the machine work and it was all done in a hurry to stop Ventor. If time resumes
and Roy dies, he will be gone for real, but he thinks he has learned enough information to save
both Jemma and Joe without much trouble. So after kissing Jemma, Roy enters the Osiris Spindle,
and waits for the machine to use him to hopefully restart the day for the last time.