The growth of the comic book super hero genre in movies today is spectacularly fecund. Marvel seems to be the biggest box office draw in the last 10 years. I hate to say this but it is part of the dumbing down of America; where once juvenile past-times and B movie drive-in and late night TV diversions are A list tickets these days. So, in that eruption of mega corporation mass marketing, a smaller "counter-culture" of movies and shows mocking and satirizing the genre. Ironically they are usually based on graphic novels like this one and Happy. And like Happy, this one is ultra violent and devoid of any really likeable or heroic characters. But this one ratchets the cynicism and violence up one more notch. For instance, the main super-"hero", Homelander, is Super Man meets Captain America all star white guy stereotype. To top it off, he is an ordained minister. Of course, he is an utter evil and depraved man, the worst of the lot. The soups, as they are called, are run by a corporation called Vought, where the cynical jaded head of it, Madelyn Stillwell, played by Elisabeth Shue, manipulates and protects her screwed up heroes. The corporation is all about money and publicity and turn every super-hero mission into social media click-bait event. The corporation also wants to get into the Pentagon defense complex. Then enter Hughie Campbell, Dennis Quaid's son Jack, a computer service tech. He was talking to his girlfriend on the street when she got gorily and horrifically splattered by a soup called A-Train who is their Flash counterpart. Not only was that over the top violent, but it suggests that running people down is a regular item for A Train, since he seems unable to dodge obstacles in his way. Come on, that is a really stupid way to get about. Well, poor Hughie was jerked around by Vought's lawyers and let down by his amiable but weak dad. So enter Billy Butcher, aka Karl Urban, a fast talking con-man come vigilante who knows what conniving scum Vought's soups are. So he convinces Hughie to go along with a plan to bug Vought's inner sanctum. Then another brutish soup, Translucent, gets wind of this and follows Hughie back to his shop to beat and try to pump info out of our hapless Hughie. But Butcher returns in the nick of time to save Hughie from this warped soup and the two, with the aid of another comic book sort called Frenchie, imprisons then eventually ends up killing Translucent. From then on, we were exposed to one nasty brutish violent incident and gun fight after another, interspersed with scenes of ruthless corporate behavior and horrific sex. Such as where a female soup called Popclaw, a Wolverine knock off, sits on then crushes a hapless guy's head after she enticed him in her bedroom for sex. Then we have a #metoo subplot, there's the sleazy soup The Deep, an Aquaman imitation, coerced a new pretty female soup Starlight aka Annie January, for some sex. Ironically the Deep was one of the less evil soups and Starlight was a virtual goddess of a classic superhero and a small town conservative Christian woman to boot. Then the Deep has a bestiality streak with a dolphin, which is cheezy enough. But he kidnaps the dolphin and when he wrecks the van, the poor dolphin gets graphically squished by an 18 wheeler.

This show just loves trashing everything from religion to even motherhood, where Vought gets mothers to be to take a drug that causes their infants to be soups. The cynicism, like the extreme violence and sex it promotes, is plain ugly. The indie movie "Super" was a good take off on super heroes w/o the extremes of this. But it is addicting and Amazon's high budget and packaging makes it easy to binge watch. It also has the malignant Seth Rogen as its producer.