Leave it to a bunch of misfits to give the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) a mighty boost.
Thunderbolts*, the franchise’s 36th (!) entry, is a Suicide Squad done right, bringing together a collection of bad guys—or, at least, not-very-good antiheroes—for an amusing adventure about battling demons of both a literal and figurative sort. With Florence Pugh as the intensely magnetic center of this ramshackle maelstrom, and despite a couple of familiar Marvel shortcomings, it’s a protean superhero saga that stands on its own—regardless of its title’s qualifying asterisk.
“There’s something wrong with me. An emptiness,” muses Red Room-trained Russian assassin Yelena Belova in Thunderbolts*, which hits theaters May 2. She may as well be speaking for the post-Endgame MCU, whose track record has been filled with more misses (Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels) than hits (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Deadpool & Wolverine).
Nonetheless, picking up where she left off in Black Widow, Yelena is a lethal mercenary, albeit one whose work—doing the dirty deeds of CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus)—is far from fulfilling. Blowing up a Kuala Lumpur research site (and killing everyone inside) is part and parcel of her soul-crushing day-to-day, and she longs for a purpose that might alleviate the loneliness and misery that’s swallowing her whole.
Disenchanted, Yelena visits her dad Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), aka the former Soviet Union’s super soldier Red Guardian, who isn’t faring much better than his daughter, watching his old career highlights in a squalid apartment when not earning a living driving a limousine (tagline: “Protecting You from Boring Evening”).
Red Guardian thinks Yelena should stick with Valentina, who’s her potential ticket to the big-time, and he appears to be correct when the intelligence agency bigwig promises her a chance to segue from covert-ops nastiness to public heroism after completing one last job. That gig involves traveling to the remote mountain stronghold of a private outfit that Valentina was using for shady purposes, and which she claims is now about to be ransacked by a thief whom Yelena must eliminate.
Even those who didn’t see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever or Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will recognize from her Cruella de Vil-ish white hair streak that Valentina is a conniving evildoer, and her secretive machinations have caught the eye of a congressional committee (led by Wendell Pierce’s crusader) that wants to impeach her.
Thunderbolts*, however, only cares about Valentina’s political fortunes as a way to give her motivation to cover her tracks—a mission that entails setting up Yelena along with the rest of her hired guns, all of whom converge at the vault with orders to off each other.
Those baddies include “dime-store Captain America” John Walker (Wyatt Russell), otherwise known as U.S. Agent; teleportation-capable slayer Ava Starr, who goes by Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen); and another blast from Yelena’s past who doesn’t make it out of this initial skirmish alive. Before the surviving trio can finish their respective jobs, they’re also joined by Bob (Lewis Pullman), a confused and seemingly ordinary stranger in hospital garb who doesn’t know how he got there.
These killers quickly deduce that they’ve been set up, and amidst much hostile bickering and I’m-the-leader posturing, they uneasily band together to escape this prison. Thunderbolts* struggles to re-introduce its players via exposition integrated into their arguments, but it wastes little time getting to its mayhem.
Alas, an early hallway battle in a smoke-filled corridor demonstrates that director Jake Schreier is intent on adhering to the MCU’s typical murky-action template, and just about every subsequent sequence set in low light is a muddy mess (its brighter passages are considerably more lucid and engaging). Worse is that the film favors a muted gray-and-gloomy color scheme throughout, which may fit its thematic concerns but prevents the material from popping.
(Warning: Minor spoilers follow.)
Thunderbolts* eventually pairs Yelena, John Walker, and Ghost with Red Guardian and the Winter Soldier himself, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), whose first term as a U.S. congressman is interrupted by his a**-kicking efforts to acquire evidence against Valentina. All of this winds up having to do with Bob, who’s the sole living guinea pig from Valentina’s create-a-superhero science experiments. He turns out to be a decidedly unstable God who can’t be managed by his maker because he’s controlled by his depression—a notion which manifests itself when Bob transforms into a shadowy deity determined to spread his emotional darkness across New York City.
The film thus becomes a story about alienation, despair, and the means by which one battles it and, in doing so, finds redemption, with Yelena connecting with Bob because, like all her unlikely mates, she too has a tormented past that’s left her insecure and wracked by guilt and shame.
Togetherness is the cure for isolation and self-doubt, and Thunderbolts* is most assured in its third act, as Bob—reborn first as the golden-haired Sentry and, then, as the annihilating Void—proves a hauntingly vacant nemesis who transforms victims into shadowy smudges.
Schreier’s drab aesthetics may be in tune with his villain but by not providing a vibrant visual contrast, the film doesn’t totally hit the highs it seeks. Even so, it has self-conscious fun positioning itself as a dark Avengers riff. And its focus on its protagonists’ internal suffering goes a long way toward letting them resonate as three-dimensional, especially in the case of Pugh’s Yelena, whose childhood ghosts both extinguish her hope for the future and allow her, ultimately, to see Bob as more than simply a threat to be neutralized.
Ghost remains more of a neat gimmick than an interesting character and John Walker never transcends his also-ran status. Yet Thunderbolts* is brimming with brashness, thanks to Pugh, Louis-Dreyfuss, and a scene-stealing Harbour as the earnest and gung-ho Red Guardian. He understands that there’s no greater calling for an extraordinary individual than helping those in need, and who’s desperate to be part of something larger than himself—namely, a team, hence his embrace of “Thunderbolts” (taken from Yelena’s winless pee-wee soccer team) as the moniker for his new ragtag squad.
His enthusiasm gives the film an invigorating shot in the arm and makes this latest MCU affair an underdog tale that’s easy to embrace—and suggests that the juggernaut movie series is on its way to recapturing its mojo.
The post ‘Thunderbolts*’ Is Finally the Shot in the Arm Marvel Needs appeared first on The Daily Beast.
