I LOVE BOOSTERS Review

With I Love Boosters, Boots Riley has made another film that feels like it was conceived at 2am by someone who read three books on Marxist theory, watched every heist movie ever made, and then ate something they probably should not have eaten. I mean this as a compliment. Mostly.

Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige play three working class Bay Area women who steal luxury goods and resell them on the street at prices normal humans can actually afford. They are not criminal masterminds. They are not even criminal middlewits. They are just three people who are tired of being poor in a city that keeps reminding them how poor they are, and watching them fumble their way through increasingly unhinged schemes is genuinely joyful in a way that only films made by people with actual convictions tend to be.

Demi Moore plays the villain, a tyrannical fashion mogul who sells clothes in one colour and if you want a different shade, deal with it, and she is caustically, magnificently funny in a role that could have been a cardboard cutout and instead becomes something genuinely memorable. Will Poulter shows up in head to toe green with a hairstyle that defies explanation and steals every second of his screen time. Don Cheadle appears in the most unhinged fat suit and prosthetics you have ever seen in your life as the head of a democracy think tank with pyramid scheme energy. This film contains multitudes.

The problem, and there is a problem, is that Riley keeps adding rooms to a house that was already plenty full. A teleportation device gets introduced and then neither fully explained nor meaningfully resolved. A subplot set in a Chinese sweatshop reaches for something genuinely important about global capitalism and labour rights and then gets swallowed by the film's own ambitions before it can land. The score never stops, not for one single second, which after a while starts to feel less like atmosphere and more like someone grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking.

But Palmer, she is something else entirely. There is a line she delivers, almost quietly, about being lonely even when she is with people, and it cuts right through all the noise and the chaos and the stop motion animation and the Marxist monologues and reminds you that underneath all of Riley's gloriously overcrowded ideas there is a real film about real people who just want to matter. That line stayed with me. She always does.

Boots Riley is making films no one else would make, about things no one else is saying, in ways no one else would think to try. That counts for a lot even when the rocket ship loses altitude somewhere over the third act.

🍿 SCORE = 72/100