Summary
Technoboys has its heart in the right place, but a played-out formula and significantly better contemporaries prevent it from standing out.
Netflix’s Technoboys has its work cut out for it. It isn’t easy being a parodical musical comedy in a world where Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping exists. The shadow of that film looms large over this Mexican satire about a once-great boy band reuniting in a world that no longer has any need for them.
Co-directed by and starring Luis Gerardo Méndez, Technoboys is self-aware but feels old-hat. The premise is overly familiar, the comedy is oftentimes forced, and the music is… well, the tunes are pretty catchy, now that I think about it.
But that’s not the point. This film lacks Popstar’s mockumentary format – it’s a straight-up narrative dramedy – but feels so derivative of it that it’s hard to ignore. A former pop icon, far beyond his best, tries to reassemble his old band without having the foresight to realize the world has moved on. Attitudes and even the business have changed.
It doesn’t help Alan, Mendez’s character, that the other members of the band have changed pretty radically too. One former member is now in a wheelchair having taken a bull’s horn in an orifice not intended to accommodate such a thing; he has reinvented himself as a macho cowboy whose old-fashioned values border on bigotry in 2024.
Another member is now a nearly-naked sexual guru with a distractingly hot wife and questionable mystical powers; another is a woman, throwing even the name “Technoboys” into a bit of dispute. Alan himself will do anything to return to the limelight but is tortured by public opinion, trends, and criticism; he’s prone to wildly self-destructive outbursts at the merest mention of his public perception, a rival boy band that happens to re-form at the exact same time, and his former flame, Melena, who has based her recent career on a racial awakening and who he’s trying desperately to win back.
A lot of these foundational elements are lifted wholesale from other similar movies – yes, including Popstar. This is what makes Technoboys so difficult to take on its own terms; it doesn’t have any. It does have a trendier sensibility, poking fun at more contemporary hot topics like cancel culture and trans rights, but the fundamentals are the same.
I will happily admit that I wasn’t totally immune to Technoboys even with this in mind. It’s pretty funny at times, the performances are enthusiastic, and as mentioned, the tunes range from okay to real earworms. And underlying the very deliberately outsized and often mocking take on the movie’s Social Issues™ is a quite earnest idea about understanding. The arc of reinvention that the Technoboys undergo takes them from a box-ticking PR diversity exercise to a real appreciation of difference, and how to reshape an entity so that difference is valued for its own sake instead of the novelty it provides.
Cynicism about industry versus sensitivity about individuality is always the thematic push-pull of movies like this. The music business is all-encompassing; it will promote what sells and stamp out what doesn’t. But music itself is meritocratic. Talent will take a person a long way, and failing that, good intentions might too. But it means circumventing the corporatism and reaching the people directly, understanding what they want and how to give it to them. Couching the reinvention of a boyband in those terms, not just highlighting where they’re out of date but letting them remodel around how they’re new, is a good idea.
But it could have stood to be better executed here. Making the humor the point of a movie like this is understandable, but it sometimes sacrifices a more coherent, meaningful throughline for easy laughs when it doesn’t need to. With this cast, there was a better take on the premise with a few tweaks to the screenplay and more judicious cuts in the editing room.
Whatever, though. A lively pace and game performances see Technoboys through to something entertaining, if not necessarily memorable. The soundtrack could probably develop a life of its own if it’s released independently of the movie, but as things stand, it probably isn’t worth almost two hours of so-so satire just for the odd catchy tune. Mileage may vary.
For those unconcerned with spoilers, I also wrote about how the ending of Technoboys does a good job of paying off these underlying themes.
