Marvel’s movies have yet to stop being box office juggernauts, but in recent years focused on multiversal storytelling, the studio’s interconnected cinematic franchise has often felt adrift and unfocused. Rather than working as films that can stand on their own, the MCU’s recent crossover features have generally resulted in dangling threads, like they’re all just previews for the next big blockbuster.
Thunderbolts*, Marvel’s new movie from director Jake Schreier, is not a one-shot solution to all of the MCU’s recent woes, but in it, you can very plainly see the studio trying to reckon with the fact that things have gone a bit off the rails. Though its story dabbles in reflections about grief, it’s mostly a straightforward action flick. At times, Thunderbolts* — the asterisk is actually kind of important — almost plays like a Marvel feature from a decade ago in terms of how simply it unfolds. But even though its flashy set pieces are familiar and its twists are very predictable, its leanness and commitment to bringing things down to earth is a mildly refreshing change of pace.
Set almost immediately after Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts* brings back a number of villains and morally questionable characters from past Marvel projects to tell a story about how the world has changed in absence of the Avengers. Though it has been years since half of the universe’s population was snapped out of existence and subsequently saved by Earth’s mightiest heroes, Thunderbolts* explores how there are still countless people struggling to make sense of life after their sudden resurrections. For Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), every day is a reminder of her sister’s sacrifice to save humanity and how they will never see each other again. Despite the years Yelena spent as a Black Widow assassin, her adoptive father Alexei Shostakov / Red Guardian believes that there is goodness within her. But with so many deaths to her name, it’s difficult for Yelena to feel like she deserves to be alive.
What both Yelena and Alexei can readily feel is a deep, existential void — the kind that can stem from losing one’s sense of purpose. It’s the sort of emotional pain that drives both of the Russians to drink themselves silly. But rather than stewing in her traumas and taking dead-end jobs like her father, Yelena tries to keep herself grounded by doing what she does best: killing people at the behest of a shadowy figure.
Though Yelena doesn’t really know any of the other highly trained (and in some cases superpowered) murderers working for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), they all have their own reasons for feeling that same void. De Fontaine and her assistant Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) work hard to keep their operatives in the dark about each other, and even harder to keep newly elected congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) off their trails. But when Yelena, disgraced Captain America knockoff John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Black Widows’s Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Ant-Man and the Wasp’s Ava Starr / Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) are all unknowingly sent to the same location with orders to kill one another, it’s clear that Valentina is trying to play them and hide her dirty work.
As Thunderbolts* brings its group of misfits together in a fantastically choreographed brawl in a bobby-trapped bunker, it is hard to ignore the degree to which cowriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo seemed to have borrowed some notes from Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad films. The movie is quick to emphasize that, because this cast of previously supporting characters has a relatively limited power set, killing some of them isn’t really all that difficult. At first, the brutal, matter-of-fact way that certain characters are offed makes it feel like Thunderbolts* wants to be a Solemn Film™ with thoughts about people’s mortality. But it’s not long before characters start making “they fly now”-grade quips.
Many of those terrible jokes involve Bob (Lewis Pullman), a seemingly normal man who Yelena and the others find sleeping in Valentina’s trove of sensitive information she means to incinerate. The film’s approach to introducing Bob is one of the more glaring and unsubtle ways it telegraphs the larger shape of its story, but the character also helps Thunderbolts articulate some of its most poignant ideas about life in the MCU.
After years of Marvel projects only kinda, sorta touching on how half of the world’s population suddenly vanishing and then reappearing five years later would leave many people profoundly traumatized, it’s genuinely compelling to see the studio actually digging into that reality. Though the team’s vices are often played for laughs, the movie presents them as manifestations of the psychological and emotional pain they’re all struggling to live with. Even Valentina’s nefarious scheming is framed as an almost understandable fear response to the fact that the world doesn’t have a name brand group of superheroes ready to fight off the next big bad.
Marvel
And when Thunderbolts* introduces its own big bad, the film actually does an impressive job of showing you how living in a constant state of uncertainty can flatten people into shadows of their former selves. That being said, the villain’s arrival also highlights the many ways in which the movie spends a lot of time spiritually re-creating beats from previous Marvel projects. Viewed through a charitable lens, one could argue those beats here are Marvel’s way of signaling that it’s trying to get back to the basics. But you would also not be wrong for thinking that Thunderbolts* and Avengers: Age of Ultron have a little bit too much in common.
Despite its overabundance of limp gags and a plot that falls short of being inspired, Thunderbolts* isn’t really a bad film per se — it’s just classic, by-the-numbers Marvel that’s coming at a time when the studio has drifted away from that style of moviemaking. This is still very much a late-stage MCU project, meaning that you really do need to have watched a few other movies and Disney Plus series to understand who these people are and why they do the things they do. But Thunderbolts* is also a bona fide B-movie that keeps things simple. Given Marvel’s last few tentpoles, maybe the world’s biggest movie franchise can learn to keep things small.
Thunderbolts* also stars Edward Pierce and Chris Bauer. The film is in theaters now.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
