Thunderbolts* puts Marvel back on track – thanks to Florence Pugh
★★★
PG, 126 minutes, in cinemas
This may be grading on a curve but I'm glad to report that with Thunderbolts*, directed by Jake Schreier, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has returned to a level of basic competence. The writing is as formulaic as ever, and the stale jokes even comment on their own staleness (when one character mentions Dr Phil, another points out that Dr Phil went off the air a while back). But it's better-paced than latter-day Marvel movies tend to be, with some effective action sequences and not too many pointless subplots.
I enjoyed it a good deal but almost entirely thanks to the actors, as always enormously better than the material deserves. First and foremost, that means Florence Pugh, returning as Yelena Belova, former Soviet super-soldier turned CIA assassin.
Basically comic relief in the 2021 Black Widow, Pugh is called on here to carry the film – and she finds a remarkable amount of nuance in a character who is basically a Cold War cartoon, as well as an adolescent fantasy of toughness and competence who beneath the surface still needs her daggy dad (David Harbour).
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as Yelena's scheming boss Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, has also been part of the MCU for a while. But she, too, has received a promotion, stepping up to become the film's chief antagonist – and she turns out to be one of the more interesting Marvel villains: a hard-nosed pragmatist far too full of herself to notice as she gradually turns into a wicked witch.
Under investigation in the US, Valentina can only escape prison by eliminating all evidence of her past misdeeds, which means ordering the deaths of Yelena and others who have done her dirty work around the world. To save themselves in turn, her targets have to band together, an opportunity for the film to teach some lessons about co-operation similar to those once instilled in kids by Sesame Street.
A cliche of more recent vintage is the allegorical handling of trauma and depression, especially through the ambiguous figure of Bob (Lewis Pullman), a bewildered escapee from a top-secret laboratory who Yelena has to discourage from turning to the dark side.
Naturally, she also has demons of her own to grapple with, though, honestly, I'm a bit weary of troubled killers learning to accept their flaws and move on; I prefer those who kill without qualms, or else those who know they're going to hell, like John Wick.
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