It’s no secret that the MCU has had some problems the past few years, starting with the slump after Avengers: Endgame and exacerbated by the COVID crisis. I mean, I’ve liked the movies and TV shows that have come out in that period — but I’m a pretty low bar (and I’m also used to comic book universes where everything is not perfect but you stick with titles anyway because you like the characters). I enjoyed (while granting some weaknesses to) Black Widow and The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World. On TV, I enjoyed Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I even found things of interest in the Secret Wars TV series (though overall I thought it failed in its ambition).
Part of the problem has been finding ways to tell interlaced stories that don’t rely on having seen everything produced to date. Part of it has been trying to capture the magic of the Avengers sequence. Part of it has been writing that was at times less than sterling. And part of it, frankly, is that there is a contingent of very loud people who want Marvel/Disney to fail, for a variety of reasons.
So, all that said, I really enjoyed Thunderbolts*. My wife, who is nothing near the fanboy I am (and puts up with so much) really liked it, too.
On one level, this movie is a sequel to Black Widow and Falcon and the Winter Soldier (and maybe a bit of Captain America: Brave New World, at least in reference). That said, I think folks could enjoy this movie without having seen or extensively studied those predecessors: one of the neat tricks the movie does is balance the tightropeof backstory exposition. We learn a lot about the characters during the film, but in ways that feel organic and unforced — no “As you know, Bob, the Winter Soldier was created by Hydra in 1946 …” infodumping.
Being clearly part of the MCU without feeling like you have to have memorized the MCU is critical for a long-running franchise of films; as one character notes, they were in high school when the Battle of New York (the first Avengers film) happened, and given that film came out in 2012, there are a lot of people who similarly struggle with remembering continuity. Thunderbolts* nails it with this one.
The movie also nails the mix between humor and seriousness. One of the touchstones of the early MCU, which carried on for some time, was using humor to dissipate too much seriousness and angst, but also keeping the dramatic stakes high to keep things from devolving into super-hero slapstick. Thunderbolts* manages to do this better than any recent MCU production, never taking itself so seriously as to be an object of derision itself, but always reminding us of the human costs and consequences of the world in which they live.
The acting overall works. The demands here are not great: this isn’t Eliot or Shaw or Woolf writing this stuff. But all our heroes are able to switch between (or combine) being serious and amusingly goofy in a way that feels comfortable and approachable. A lot of what Thunderbolts* is about is heroes dealing with less-than-heroic and less-than-successful pasts, and what guilt and trauma and and failure lack of agency and stress can do to a person. The actors we have here, particularly the PoV character, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova (the White Widow), handle this well, neither making things too grimdark, nor trivializing important issues.
Outside of the core team, the supporting cast, particularly Julia Louis-Drefuss as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, are solid. So is Lewis Pullman as “Bob,” in all his incarnations. I don’t expect any Best Actor nominations here, but everything is competent.
Without going into details, the story overall works pretty well, doing from solo mission to building the team to struggling against the odds to struggling against impossible odds. And while this is a comic book movie, not every problem is solved with fists and explosions. In fact, most of the important ones are not.
While the stakes in the film are, from one perspective, dismayingly high, the movie never loses its sight on the personal and ordinary. Where most superhero flicks have some sort of disaster porn of buildings collapsing and screaming crowds below, Thunderbolts* keeps its eyes on those people, making the heroics of the protagonists not just punching bad guys, but saving the innocent, over and over.
I was mostly unspoiled for the movie (an increasingly difficult task), so I was surprised more often than some movie-goers would be (including some of the discussions about Bob and Taskmaster, as well as the climactic reveal at the end). The movie certainly kept me on my toes wondering what would happen next.
From a production standpoint, part of what also makes all this work is that the “powers” involved are relatively subtle, with most of the action being fight choreography. Yes, there is some flying, there are some super-powered fisticuffs, there is some CG-augmented action — but the movie comes across as very grounded and much less interested in Michael Bey-like explosions and more on physical and emotional combat.
Overall, I’m not sure this movie needs to be seen in the theater (let alone in 3-D, if that’s being offered), but it is definitely a good watch, arguably the best thing from the MCU in several years. I expect I will watch it a number more times in the future.
OBLIGATORY END-OF-MOVIE NOTE: There are two credits cut-in scenes, at the usual timestamps (one after the initial flashy credits, one at the very end). Both are entertaining and worth watching, though only the last one (before the lights come up) is of much consequence, albeit being a bit predictable.
Do you want to know more?
- IMDb
- Wikipedia
- themoviedb.org
- Rotten Tomatoes
- Letterboxd (an early version of this review)