Boots Riley’s sophomore feature follows the same formula as his debut, Sorry to Bother You—a film that holds immense visual invention, but one where the invention is ultimately overcooked. The narrative in I Love Boosters frequently stalls out on absurdist visual gags that feel ungainly. It is an excessive style that feels tacked on to a story and ideas that are certainly rich in satire. Because Riley treats his characters like glorified cartoon figures, the final approach feels less like cinematic satire and more like a live-action Adult Swim sketch.
The direction and visuals are indeed awe-inspiring; every frame is crammed with ravishing colors, beautiful decor, memorable skyscrapers, and a fever-dream atmosphere. However, the absurdist humor feels as though it were written by Boots Riley during hallucinatory twilight hours—an eye-rolling approach that recalls the worst, most self-indulgent aspects of Terry Gilliam. Furthermore, the bizarre humor involving Lakeith Stanfield as a demon who eats the souls of women feels entirely tacked on, doing nothing to help Riley’s narrative discipline.
Continuing his hyper-stylized execution in a dystopian San Francisco Bay Area, Riley takes a Robin Hood approach to a heist narrative, spinning it into a blend of surrealism, science fiction, and anti-capitalist satire on greed, exploitation, and fashion. The plot explores how local shoplifting eventually links to international corporatism—exposing a system where conglomerates receive government handouts to reduce costs, while the workers are subjected to unfair wages and unsafe working conditions.
Courtesy Neon
The film has a first-rate female cast that I love a lot as it follows Corvette (Keke Palmer), an aspiring fashion designer who is drowning in debt (symbolized literally by a physical boulder of overdue bills that rolls after her wherever she goes). This marks the second comedy now of Palmer playing characters that are undermined by the current economic milieus of income inequality, I highly recommend the hilarious One of Them Days. Corvette meets with her friend Mariah (Taylour Paige). To make a living, they form their own booster shoplifting ring and call “The Velvet Gang” alongside their friend Sade (Naomi Ackie).
The ring targets a chain called Metro Design–an exploitive fashion retailer that is owner by billionaire fashion designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore). While her products are designed well, the clothes are way overpriced, and the ring steal the clothes and sell them for the third of the cost to the local community. They even have their own slogan called “Triple F” (Fashion Forward Philanthropy). Christie Smith operates out of a leaning skyscraper in San Francisco, where the theft is very noticlble and she labels them “low-class urban bitches”. Little does Christie know that they are actually retail workers to one of her stores where their outfits that they must wear to work are taken out of their paychecks at very large sums. They attempt to rebuttal the unfairness to their uptight store manager, Grayson (Will Pulter), who gaslights them as being “hostile”.
Corvette and the ring get frustrated once they realize that their theft isn’t hitting Christine’s bottom line, so they plan a more intensive inside job to steal more clothes. However, their plans are disrupted when they encounter Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a worker from Christine’s sweatshop in China. There, her family and co-workers are underpaid, overworked, and suffering from respiratory infections and lung cancer caused by inhaling dangerous particles from sandblasting denim. Jianhu escaped by stealing a prototype teleportation device—originally designed to bypass shipping costs by beaming product directly from China to the US. Instead, Jianhu uses the device to vacuum entire Metro Design storefronts, making the clothes vanish into thin air.
Courtesy Neon
The ring ends up teaming up with Jianhu, and they encounter another class-conscious, heavily exploited retail employee named Violeta (Eiza González). She uses the teleportation device to further their heist: stealing a vault that contains Christie’s $100,000 suit line during Christie’s fall fashion show. From there, the film really derails, launching into car-chase sequences, teleportation, and other nonsense involving a band of think tank members who have removed their own skin just so they can wear the $100,000 suits.
Boots Riley is certainly a filmmaker of vision, but he has no restraint or control. Everything is stylized with eye-popping cinematography, outfits, offices, and world-building. It wasn’t until well into the second half, once the teleportation device is introduced, that I realized just how eye-rolling and annoying this approach could get. While the film offers some humorous moments, there is just as much painful humor.
Fortunately, the movie is anchored by a superb cast. Keke Palmer always brings such charisma to the screen that you constantly find yourself rooting for her, along with Elena Paige and Naomi Ackie. Furthermore, the film’s satire regarding corporate greed, exploitation, and rampant, unchecked capitalism is certainly urgent for times like these. However, Riley’s approach and style wobble back and forth—shifting from sharp and satirical one moment to low-brow and inane the next. Additionally, the needless romance for Corvette involving Lakeith Stanfield felt like it belonged in another movie; it didn’t add much to the story, unless one wants to claim it was a commentary on female empowerment over men.
Courtesy Neon
Boots Riley is undeniably an original voice. There has been high praise for his Amazon series I’m a Virgo, and he previously made a huge splash with Sorry to Bother You, which follows an office worker who uses a “white voice” to increase sales. He is certainly an auteur, but just as I experienced with his series, Riley’s abrupt shifts into sci-fi body horror in the third act of the film undermine the satire established so well in the first two-thirds, making it feel more like shock value than an embellishment of grounded ideas. Riley throws way too much at the screen, and the outcome is a messy, overstuffed movie where his approach strips away any true human connection to the story. Hopefully, next time Riley can hone things in a bit more and bring higher stakes to his character arcs and storytelling.
I Love Boosters is now playing in theaters
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