‘Thunderbolts*' Asks: Who Wants the Off-Brand Avengers?
Early on in Marvel's Thunderbolts* — after we've seen special operative Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) plummet off a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, but before we see Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) wash his prosthetic limb in a dishwasher — a gala event is held in what used to be the Avengers Tower. The former headquarters of Earth's Mightiest Heroes was purchased by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the CIA director and MCU backroom string-puller, several years ago. An exhibit for the Battle of New York fills the lobby, with guests admiring alien artifacts and other recovered items from a day that will live in franchise infamy. The whole thing is bit of a front on de Fontaine's part, given that she deals in shady shenanigans that would've put her at odds with Tony Stark and Co.'s overall do-gooder mission. But it's also a flex; she's keen on not only reclaiming the legacy of Iron Man, Captain America, et al., but reminding people why superheroes were a big deal in the first place. A real glory-days memory jogger, in other words.
You, too, may remember that moment nearly 13 years ago when, having patiently set the stage for a massive crossover team-up, Marvel Studios unleashed The Avengers on a rabid public and terraformed an industry in the process. To say that results have varied since then is like referring to the Thanos Snap as a 'time out.' Thunderbolts* wants to channel this specific MCU milestone — and the rush of that first Marvel wave as a whole — so badly that there are moments where you feel like it's one more room in Valentina's museum, paying tribute to a long-gone past. There's even a reprise of the original's iconic assembling moment, now featuring a hulking Russian brute, his venomous daughter, a 'junior varsity Captain America,' the man with the golden cyborg arm, and a clutch-cargo utility player.
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The good news is that its hit-to-miss ratio in this respect favors the former part to a large degree, even if this can't go back in time à la Endgame-era Avengers and reverse the quality-control catastrophes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's previous five years. The 36th movie in this ongoing, omnipresent pop soap opera is wildly uneven. It's also thrilling, funny, and simultaneously irreverent yet highly respectful of the House That Kevin Feige Built. Plus it works surprisingly well as both a stand-alone (kinda) entry and a bridge between where this series has been and, per the requisite post-credits tease, where it's headed to. Who needs an off-brand Avengers, made up of peripheral characters given a chance to collectively level up? Turns out the answer is: You do.
Actually, if you'll pardon the mixed intellectual-property-universe comparison, the ragtag ensemble of assassins, former double agents, and idiosyncratic supporting players who make up the 'Thunderbolts' — the name starts off as joke, taken from Yelena's victory-less childhood soccer team, then sticks despite her dismay — bear a stronger resemble to D.C.'s Suicide Squad. Bucky, Yelena, her raucous dad Alexei 'The Red Guardian' Shostakov (David Harbour), John 'U.S. Agent' Walker (Wyatt Russell), and the ethereal, matter-shifting Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) all started out as supervillains, before being officially rebranded here as morally dubious antiheroes. Valentina even acts as a sort of boss-slash-antagonist in the same manner as Viola Davis' Amanda Waller, though rather than gather them together for a do-or-die mission, she manipulates several future 'Bolts into a just-die-already scenario. Congress is investigating her clandestine superhero-adjacent activities. Each of these killers is a loose end. Why not turn them on each other and keep her hands clean?
The plan backfires, especially after Yelena, Walker, and Ghost realize they've been set up. Worse, they've got to fight their way out of this sticky situation when government goons arrive to finish the job, which requires working together and trusting each other [cue mutual groan]. And then there's Bob (Lewis Pullman). Having wandered into the middle of their melee in his pajamas, this timid, slightly nebbishy dude is a mystery to all of them. Bob doesn't quite know what he's doing at a remote military outpost either. Maybe it has something to do with the 'Sentry Project,' a super-secret operation that Valentina would very much like to be swept under a thousand different rugs. Maybe that's also why Bucky, having been tipped off by Valentina's assistant (Geraldine Viswanathan), ends up ditching his political career and meets up with the fugitives, as well as Yelena's boisterous, limo-driving pops. Maybe the unassuming, awkward guy who seems like an innocent bystander is actually the most powerful and volatile presence in this whole equation. Lotta maybes here, folks.
As any Nick Fury wannabe will tell you, the key to assembling a crack superhero team is knowing what each member's strengths are, and which combination yields the most complementary sum of all parts. Same thing goes for ensemble casts, and having seeded all of these disparate, disreputable ladies and not-so-gentle men in various chapters over the past decade, the creative (and corporate) powers that be have come up with a combination that works better than you might expect. Everyone knows the parts they've got play: Stan is in charge of the meditative brooding, Harbour's responsible for the high-volume bluster, Russell brings the Grade-A asshole vibe, Pullman pulls off both the man-child and megalomania aspects, and John-Kamen dutifully fills in any leftover gaps. You wish Viswanathan had more to do, given she's often the best thing about whatever project she's a part of, but the competition for screen time and making marks amid director Jake Schreier's impressive sound and fury here is stiff. (Finally, some MCU action set pieces that feel once again feel cohesive!) Unless you're Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, of course, in which sporting a Sontag-level hairdo stripe and blessing lines like 'Righteousness without power is just an opinion' with a deadly comic spin ensures she steals every single scene she's in regardless.
And Pugh? She's the cleanup batter who adds levity, gravity, and whole other levels of depth to the proceedings. A force to be reckoned with ever since 2016's Lady Macbeth coronated her as a major talent, Pugh is undeniably a genuine movie star; there's a strong argument to be made that she doesn't need Thunderbolts*, and the MCU in general, as much as it certainly needs her. Yet this compact powerhouse of a performer has a knack for never making you feel like she thinks she's better than all of this, even though she clearly is. It's not just Pugh's screen presence, her sense of commitment or her penchant for making weapons-grade snark work, but her determination to mine mother lodes of psychological and emotional turmoil that gets you invested in this rollicking blockbuster past the usual franchise box-ticking. Notably when things get both literally and figuratively dark. Without being a complete spoiler-lobbing killjoy, this is a story heavily marinated in trauma, with an emphasis on two parties' checkered past in particular. Pugh sells everything, the good and the bad and the cinematic-universe fulfillment of it all, without making you feel like you've been sold another chapter of the same old smash-and-dance. Plus she's a great team player.
About that curious, annoying asterisk in the title: It's there to designate a sense of temporariness, suggesting a placeholder in lieu of something more appropriate and permanent. Whether the 'solution' to this so-called issue is resolved to your liking, or indeed remains in place past that extended post-credits wrap-up-slash-preview of what's on deck, is subjective to a large degree. We can say that it plays into Thunderbolts*'s sense of meta-purpose, which is to harken back to an age before 'superhero fatigue' was a buzz phrase — before what felt like most colossal I.P. game in town got brought down to size by bad decisions, constricting levels of hopelessly interconnected canon, and a woeful sense of overreach fueled by cockiness. The primary goal of this entry is to establish a new team of heroes. The secondary aim is to stop what's undeniably been a downward spiral. It succeeds in that respect at the very least. Don't call it a return to form so much as a much-needed, extremely welcome return to a winning formula.
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