The Bottom Line
Details
- Stars Chris Lilley
- Created by Chris Lilley
- Airs Sundays at 10 and 10:30 p.m. EST on HBO starting January 1, 2012
Review
I didn’t much care for Summer Heights High, which featured Lilley playing three different characters in an Australian high school, and Angry Boys features essentially the same format: It’s a mockumentary with Lilley playing multiple characters, in this case six different people whose stories are loosely connected and vaguely represent the idea of exploring the mindsets and circumstances of young men. The teenage twins Dan and Nathan Sims, who live in rural Australia, return from Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes, and they’re joined by their grandmother, a youth-prison guard known as Gran; American rapper S. Mouse; washed-up former surfing legend Blake Oakfield; and extremely overbearing Japanese mother Jen Okazaki. Lilley puts on blackface to play S. Mouse, the most obnoxious and least amusing character of the group, and his portrayals of both S. Mouse and Jen Okazaki are steeped in racial stereotypes.
Worse, they’re not funny: S. Mouse is a clumsy, obvious parody of pop-rappers like Soulja Boy, and Lilley doesn’t seem to quite understand American hip-hop culture. Jen takes the Asian Tiger Mother archetype to its extreme in her micromanaging of her skateboarding-prodigy son Tim’s career, but her selfish single-mindedness doesn’t really satirize anything specific about the Japanese. Lilley fares better with Dan and Nathan, two rude and crude teenage boys, one of whom is nearly deaf and partially mentally challenged. Their dynamic is the closest Angry Boys comes to genuine social commentary mixed in with its humor, which is something that Lilley appears to be aiming for.
Most of the characters are too cartoonish for any of their issues to be taken seriously, but the jokes aren’t funny enough to pick up the slack. Angry Boys shows Lilley running out of steam, able to hit only the same few notes even as he’s given a much more expansive format to work with.
