The Boys, Away and our Mulan review

It’s one of Amazon’s most watched shows, and now The Boys is back
for a second season. While Katie and Stevie couldn’t be any more
excited, Bethany is reserving her judgement. With more graphic
violence and gore than you can shake a stick at, it’s certainly not
for the faint hearted.

Netflix blasts into space with its ambitious space drama Away,
starring Hilary Swank as a conflicted captain on a mission to Mars.
The team have mixed reactions to some of the no-gravity scenes,
achieved with the help of wires and some super slo-mo acting. One
thing they do agree on is that space seems to get better phone
reception than all of the WFH locations they’ve so far explored in
their own flats.

We go back to the roots of a popular Swedish detective in Young
Wallander, also on Netflix. While the show doesn’t hold back on the
torso shots (proving that lead actor Adam Palsson hasn’t been
slacking in the gym), it’s Scandi-crime credentials are slightly
less forthcoming. For those that don’t like subtitles though, this
English-language interpretation does mean you can skip all the
pesky reading and concentrate on the gratuitous upper-body
nudity.

Meanwhile, Disney’s big blockbuster of the year premieres on their
streaming service Disney +. The latest in their long line of action
re-makes, Chinese actress Liu Yifei stars in the hard-to-fill lead
role. With more attention paid to the original 6th century folk
tale than the 1998 cartoon version, Stevie educates everyone when
he explains what the name Mushu actually means (Spoiler alert:
Mushu the dragon, voiced by Eddie Murphy in the Disney original,
isn’t in the remake. There is a phoenix.). While it’s a decent
re-telling, everyone wonders if kids will have the stamina to
actually sit through the $200m (£150m) epic.

And in possibly the craziest film the Backstage gang have ever
reviewed, Charlie Kaufman latest movie I’m Thinking Of Ending
Things comes to Netflix. Starring a pair of Jessies – Irish actress
Jessie Buckley and American actor Jesse Plemons – this
genre-confounding movie will keep you on your toes and most likely
make you question the meaning of life, the universe and
everything…

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