“Thunderbolts” opens (as it should – when you’ve got the goods, you use them) with Florence Pugh.
Yelena Belova (Pugh), younger sister of Natasha Romanoff – AKA, the Black Widow – is on a mission, sent by CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to destroy any and all evidence of a super soldier experiment gone wrong. As the last scientist standing tries to take her down, she begins to narrate exactly how the following scene will play out – there’ll be a scramble for the gun, a brief skirmish resulting in a bunch of smashed lab equipment, the scientist will make a brave attempt at a few last words, and Yelena will kill him. Bing, bang, boom, done.
Throughout this sequence, Yelena sounds bored. There’s a sort of bland routine here that she’s making fun of, a monotony that exists despite the action, and the guns, and the superheroes. She might be talking about the mission at hand, but it’s not hard to make the leap that this is “Thunderbolts” commenting on the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. The formula is becoming tired, the fanfare around every new movie or show less and less exciting. Every new entry feels like a chore we’re forced to endure.
But as much as this moment with Yelena is poking fun at the state of these movies, “Thunderbolts” is not suggesting that Marvel abandon the routine all together – just that it tries to get back to whatever made that early run of movies work in the first place. “Thunderbolts” feels closer to 2012’s “The Avengers” than any of the more recent offerings, albeit with a slightly nastier crew. And, by God, it kind of works!
“Thunderbolts” is the best thing Marvel has put out in years. Granted, that isn’t saying much – at the very least, it feels like an actual movie rather than a whole lot of made-by-committee nothing. It might push its emotional point a little far at the end, the sentiment feeling a tad more forced than one might like. But – and I don’t say this lightly about a movie from one of the biggest machines in Hollywood – its heart is in the right place. It’s got the humor, the action is clean, and it makes the smart choice of centering the film around Pugh, who feels more like a movie star than a superhero.
In sending Yelena on this cleanup job, Valentina has an ulterior motive – get rid of all her assets so they don’t burn her. Enter U.S. Agent, or John Walker (Wyatt Russell); Ghost, or Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov, or Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). As the four try to kill each other, they encounter Bob (Lewis Pullman), a sweet, bumbling civilian with a mysterious past. Yelena becomes fond of Bob, and when Valentina puts him in danger, the crew teams up with Yelena’s father Alexei, or the Red Guardian (David Harbour) and the newly minted Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to save him.
“Thunderbolts” smartly centers the emotional arc of the story around Yelena, who is probably the most recognizable of this new crop of characters. Over the years since “Avengers: Endgame,” Marvel has had a problem making audiences care about characters who aren’t Spider-Man, or Iron Man, or one of the other more recognizable heroes – heck, they sometimes even have trouble making people care about Captain America. Yelena might not be someone that the casual Marvel fan knows a whole lot about, but the casual moviegoer probably knows Florence Pugh. It’s what these movies have kind of always been missing. With your typical Marvel movie, most fans will care more about the character than the actor playing the character. Here, the actor is the draw, and is able to bring the gravitas needed to make a lesser-known character feel consequential.
Yelena is on the hero’s journey, mercenary style, as are all of the team members who will eventually join the Thunderbolts (named, humorously, after Yelena’s peewee soccer team). The movie’s ability to mix humor with more dramatic elements feels very old school Marvel.
Yelena, along with all of her fellow heroes, is stuck in a rut. Her sister died, her dad is afraid to talk to her, and she’s quickly falling into a depressive spiral as she spends her days reliving all the terrible things she has done while constantly adding new things to the list. At the beginning of the film, she explains all of this to a guard she has taken hostage as though he were her therapist, explaining away her darkest thoughts as though her biggest problem was that she’s a workaholic. Moments like these are littered throughout “Thunderbolts.” When the crew checks in on each other after they’re all forced to relive their worst moments, Bucky – formerly tortured into becoming a brainwashed assassin – says, in a half-hearted attempt at diffusion: “I have a great past. I’m fine.”
The humor is a little dryer than most Marvel movies, but for the most part it pairs nicely with the film’s more serious themes. It also drives the point of the film – that all these so-called villains really need is a big hug and a family – home. As “Thunderbolts” goes on, saving Bob becomes the focal point, and Yelena and Bob’s respective relationships to their past traumas take center stage. “Thunderbolts” becomes a movie about superheroes with depression, and while that point is somewhat beaten over the head at the end, the visual representation of depression is interestingly conceived – a far cry from the messy CGI battles that usually characterize Marvel’s third acts.
The Thunderbolts are billed as heroes no one really cares about, and the marketing surrounding the movie itself, while funny at times, has felt a little laissez-faire. There’s nowhere near as much of an air of importance surrounding this movie as there is for, say, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” coming out later this year. Funny, that the movie about heroes that no one really cares about is what has ended up working in this late stage Marvel game.