I Love Boosters: Outlaws Join Jianhu’s Labor Protest — SkimNews
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- I Love Boosters follows three outlaw women—Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige)—who, nettled by Christie Smith’s arrogance, steal her clothes from upscale stores and resell them at “knockdown Robin Hood prices.”
- Mariah, played by Taylour Paige, can hold her breath and transform into a white woman less likely to be challenged in a store, a power the review reads through Frantz Fanon’s “black skin, white masks.”
- Dr Jack, played by Don Cheadle, runs a charismatic community friendship self-help scheme that is actually a fraudulent pyramid scam.
- LaKeith Stansfield plays a laid-back charmer and oral-sex enthusiast who entices Corvette but is revealed as a demonic male succubus.
- Jianhu, played by Poppy Liu, uses a toilet-seat-sized portal ring to suck all the clothes from a store and teleport them back to China, where underpaid workers have been making them under “scandalously bad conditions”; her protest against Christie Smith’s exploitative employment practices forces the boosters into common cause and onto the moral high ground.
- Demi Moore plays Christie Smith in a potent but limited returning cameo, not the gamey starring role the review suggests she may have expected given her Oscar-nominated turn in The Substance.
- Boots Riley’s film offers enough material for a 12-episode streaming show, but its mile-a-minute structure and near-incoherent sensory overload make the compressed feature exhausting even when it is often funny.
Why it matters: By placing the three boosters in common cause with Jianhu, the film changes the moral frame of their shoplifting campaign: Christie Smith’s exploitative employment practices become the ethical center. The result places the three antiheroines on the moral high ground while preserving the caper’s frantic comic machinery.
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