"Thunderbolts*" review — Marvel's new heroes on the block
“So none of us can fly? We all just punch and shoot?”
Life hasn’t been kind to Yelena Belova. Born to a pair of Soviet special agents, she was trained as a child in the abusive Red Room, was involved in a distrustful home life embedded in international spy work, and forced to become a killer out of survival. Nowadays, she spends her days disconnected from her father, fighting off nascent alcoholism, unable to move on from the death of her sister, Natasha Romanov, and running black ops missions for one Valentina Allegra de Fontaine and the clandestine wings of the CIA. Life hasn’t been good for anyone in the employ of De Fontaine. John Walker, a wannabe Captain America replacement, is trying to hold his family together while dealing with his dishonourable discharge from the military and his role as a national figurehead. Antonia Dreykov, an assassin with the power to mimic the fighting abilities of her opponents, has only just bounced from the control of her evil father into doing illicit work for the Americans. Ava Starr, also known as Ghost, is battling her unstable intangible abilities, the result of a tragic childhood accident that claimed the lives of her parents, while trying to stay afloat thanks to de Fontaine. And now, trapped in a black site storage facility deep underground, the four have all been sent to kill each other in a desperate attempt by de Fontaine to clean house.
Audiences might not know Florence Pugh’s Yelena all that well. She’s been scurrying on the outer rim of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), playing the second lead in the disappointing Black Widow spin-off film and making a guest appearance in the Hawkeye Disney+ series. Despite Pugh being such a massive star, it’s easy for the new phases on the block to get lost in the fray with the Marvel market being as oversaturated as it is (with thirteen films and sixteen seasons of television released between January 2021 and the present). Finally, Pugh is given a starring vehicle in the form of Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts*, the phase five finale. The rest of the ensemble is in a similar predicament, too. The band of anti-heroes, mercenaries, and ne’er-do-wells that make up the titular team are also pulled from the far corners of the last three MCU phases. Walker was an antagonist in the better first half of the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; Ghost was a tertiary character from Ant-Man and the Wasp; and Taskmaster and Alexei Shostakov (Yelena’s father) are further leftovers from the aforementioned Black Widow spin-off; and Bucky Barnes, while the most well-established of the troupe, has been playing second fiddle to Captain America since 2011. It’s like the first Avengers movie, if that ensemble was pulled from the B and C lists of the MCU. And, refreshingly, it kind of works.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
Down in the basement of De Fontaine’s base, things are heating up. Not only are the characters ready to strike against each other and, now, De Fontaine, but the room is about to become a literal incinerator filled with all of the human, paper, and technological trash the CIA is trying to purge. Oh, and there’s also a guy named Bob there. None of them like each other all that much, but they just might need to let those differences aside for a moment to get out alive. After a death-defying escape into deserts of the Southwestern United States, the Thunderbolts (a name reluctantly bestowed upon them) catch up with aging Soviet super soldier Alexei (AKA Red Guardian) and World War II veteran-turned-Hydra assassin-turned-congressman Bucky Barnes and set a crash course for De Fontaine and her allusive Sentry project in New York City. And Bob’s there. Who’s Bob again?
Thunderbolts* (which has been publicly re-titled as The New Avengers) is probably the closest thing we’ve had to an Avengers movie since Endgame six years ago. Where phases four and five, in the opinion of this reviewer, have felt like the MCU in its wilderness years with a slew of often disconnected projects failing to make the franchise feel cohesive in any meaningful way, this film makes a conscious effort to not just tie up loose ends (something that killed Captain America: Brave New World earlier this year), but sets a course forward for the franchise as a whole. It’s a rather exciting step forward for a series that feels like its best days are behind. Thunderbolts*, despite its new name, is also very much not an Avengers film. The events of the 2012 original are brought up frequently here, with references to the Battle of New York, the Chitauri invasion, and the formation of Earth’s mightiest heroes, none of whom seem to be present anymore. While the film returns to some familiar locations, including the remodelled Stark Tower, the Thunderbolts are not heroes by any stretch of the imagination. The film takes full advantage of its flawed, emotionally volatile characters to create a story that is messy and surprisingly emotionally effective. It’s more of a character piece than the average Marvel film. The set pieces are smaller-scale and the self-sacrificial heroics are nearly absent (these aren’t heroes after all), but the film does deliver some incredibly solid character beats and a fun team-up narrative.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
Most of the ensemble, the film’s lynchpin, is fabulous. Florence Pugh serves as the film’s central character, Yelena, and its primary emotional on-ramp. Pugh brings an emotionally detailed performance to the assassin, while being able to play well with the film’s prevalent sarcastic sense of humour. David Harbour plays Red Guardian, Yelena’s father, a washed-up super soldier who has grown distant from his daughter. He’s running a limo business now and spends his nights drinking vodka and watching tapes of his time in the service of the government of the U.S.S.R. Harbour brings heroism and vulnerability to Alexei that makes him one of the film’s most entertaining and rewarding characters. Wyatt Russell’s return as John Walker (AKA U.S. Agent) is a welcome one. After Walker went borderline insane in his stint on Disney+, he serves as a foil to the rest of the team by playing a holier-than-thou and often cruel narcissist. Hannah John-Kamen makes a belated return after a seven-year absence from the series, reprising Ghost from Ant-Man and the Wasp. While the Ant-Man sequel makes her role fairly forgettable, John-Kamen finally gets to show off here with an embittered, biting performance as the physically unstable (in a literal sense) translucent thief. Finally, Lewis Pullman’s Robert “Bob” Reynolds — whose role in this film has been intentionally left vague by the marketing, although comic fans immediately know what’s going on — is a treat. A recovering meth adict who finds himself in situations he can never quite account for, Bob’s been embroiled in De Fontaine’s secret “Sentry” experiments and might just be a game changer for the wider universe.
Director Jake Schreier, who is following up on the success of his Netflix series, Beef, is fairly adept at putting together a well-constructed Marvel film that not only fulfils its franchise obligations of being the next episode in the series but also feels like a pretty decent movie on its own. The film’s marketing emphasized the incredible creative talent behind the film, including its many connections to the artists behind many of the past decades’ independent hits. The score here is a highlight. Composed by American experimental outfit Son Lux, the score uses its intense strings quite effectively, with the track “First Flight” being one of its strongest moments. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, who also shot The Green Knight, gives the film a darker, more grey visual palette, which complements the darker sense of morality of the characters and its themes of darkness and recovery quite well. While Pugh describing Thunderbolts* as something akin to an A24 film is certainly excessive, this is still just a Marvel movie after all, it is certainly a welcome sight to see Marvel Studios celebrate its artists and to see their work start to pay off. This feels like an actual movie, and not just the next episode in the never-ending, and increasingly disconnected, Marvel soap opera.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
Not everything in Thunderbolts* works as well as it should. Unfortunately, Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine, even with having such a beautiful mouthful of a name, feels like a nothing burger of a character. The film’s writing never gives the character a presence that lives up to the exuberant nature of her name and Louis-Dreyfus brings not a whole lot to the character. In a franchise full of shadowy government actors, De Fontaine is nothing remarkable. She plays the closest thing the film has to a consistent antagonist, but never goes beyond just a mildly annoying shady Republican. This problem carries on to her extra-governmental organization O.X.E., which, while playing a critical role in Bucky’s comic book stint as Captain America and his time leading the Thunderbolts, never feels all that interesting here, again, largely because this a series with more evil secret organizations than you can shake a stick at. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes feels a little underloved here, too. It’s clear that the series doesn’t really know what to do with Barnes without Steve Rogers around. The character is currently serving a term in Congress, but it’s unclear why or how this plays into his development as a character. On paper, the former Winter Soldier would make for a natural addition to this team of less-than-honourable men and women. But in execution, Bucky, an elder statesman of the MCU, is awkwardly placed at a distance from the main emotional action, making him feel like an outsider here and never a full part of the story.
By the time we roll into the third act, things start getting messy. The team is woefully underprepared to take on the seemingly all-powerful Void, a new malignant power accidentally created by De Fontaine, and so they are forced to use the Void’s psychic abilities against it, leading to the characters jumping from traumatic memory to traumatic memory to stop the villain’s mental prisons. The third act, in my mind, comes together far too conveniently, and its interesting setting is never utilized as creatively as it could be. While the third act emphasizes the power of healing from trauma and gives from great payoff for Yelena and Bob, the rest of the cast doesn’t get their due here, meaning that their potentially interesting arcs don’t get the payoff they deserve. The film is about deeply broken people, which makes for an excellent narrative thrust and for some great character exploration. The film hits home its themes of reconciliation, rebuilding broken lives, and coming to terms with pain and grief, all of which lead to a Marvel more emotionally attuned than the average. But when the finale struggles to actually pay off all of the arcs present, all of which are interesting, it’s clear that Schreier has mismanaged how the finale plays out and how each character comes to terms with their darker side. It is a disappointment, then, that not all of the characters have the same sense of grace and forgiveness extended to them that’s available for Bob and Yelena.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
It might be too little, too late, but Thunderbolts* makes for a step in the right direction for a franchise that I, as well as many critics and the box office, were increasingly tired of. The story here is a fairly back-to-basics sort of Marvel adventure that would fit in scale with the more laid-back narratives of phases one and two, but it’s a nice change of pace from the multiversal heights of previous phase four and five installments. It pulls together pieces of the MCU in a more organic way than the dreadful Brave New World. While it’s not quite as energetic, earnest, or enthusiastic, it does have elements of what made Guardians of the Galaxy so exciting eleven years ago. It finds a fairly holistic blend of humour, action, and heart, which largely comes from some magnetic leading performances. The characters are interesting, the film looks and sounds good, the film is surprisingly emotional, and it left me curious about what this franchise has in store still. It’s not perfect, far from it, but it mostly works. I’ll take a Marvel film that mostly works over the sludge of the last four years any day. Now, the real test is to see if this energy can carry over into the ever-heightening expectations placed on Avengers: Doomsday next summer. Here’s to the New Avengers, I guess.
Thunderbolts* is now playing in theatres.
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