'Thunderbolts*': Even Superheroes Get the Blues
A witty self-awareness and earnest thematic stakes lead to Marvel's best movie since 'Endgame.'
Marvel is currently in this weird space where they keep trying to find a way back to their wild success in the lead-up to Avengers: Endgame. But their post-2019 output constantly feels like the product of various derailments, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney’s demand that the company create shows to fill space on the Disney+ platform, and banking on Jonathan Majors to be an era-defining villain only to scrap that plan and start over when Majors became a toxic asset. These were not necessarily Marvel’s fault, but they presented a series of challenges where the studio never seemed to have the sure footing it presented in its first decade. The resulting films range between entertaining-yet-forgettable like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and outright slop like this past February’s Captain America: Brave New World.
So perhaps it’s fitting that a movie about unlikely heroes provides the jolt that Marvel has missed these past years. The studio’s marketing for Thunderbolts* has been bizarre, ranging from trading in on art-house favorites to blurbing every Marvel fan with a Twitter account, but the film itself is as surehanded as anything the studio has produced in the last 17 years. Rather than just feeling like Marvel’s version of Suicide Squad or an attempt to salvage past Marvel projects, Thunderbolts* uses the Guardians of the Galaxy template to not only throw together a team of deeply flawed misfits, but uses it to face emotional stakes rather than get too hung up on what’s involved with saving the world this time. Director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo made a movie where the villain is depression and the superheroes are sad, and it ended up being the Marvel movie that made me feel the most joy from start to finish since Endgame.
Yelena (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) have all been working shady, off-the-books jobs for the corrupt CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) when their latest task involves each of these morally questionable characters killing each other as part of Valentina’s latest cover-up. Instead, they reluctantly work together along with Bob (Lewis Pullman), a mild-mannered guy who happened to be in one of Valentina’s top-secret research facilities. With Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) now working as a congressman to try and stop Valentina through official oversight, this new group of misfits, who team up with Yelana’s enthusiastic father and Soviet superhero has-been Alexei (David Harbour), struggle to figure out what Bob’s deal is and not kill each other in the process.
Although Thunderbolts* eventually reaches its save-the-world stakes (visualized with a cool and unnerving growing darkness), the film’s real goal is about the darkness these characters carry. What separates them from typical Marvel villains is that they all have consciences, and they know they’ve done wrong, but are stuck in a cycle of shame and anguish. Enter Bob, who says in so many words that he suffers from bipolar disorder. The stakes transform from merely stopping Valentina’s evil scheme to the mental welfare of an average guy. Even though some past Marvel movies involve talking someone off a ledge (e.g., Spider-Man: Homecoming), Thunderbolts uses emotional connection as the crux of its thematic catharsis rather than a tidy way to wrap up the picture.
This approach is particularly surprising when you consider how quippy and self-aware the movie can be. The best Marvel movies typically rely on characters being able to bounce off each other quickly, and Thunderbolts* gets a lot of mileage from these characters not only disliking each other, but that they aren’t here to make friends. The Avengers also began as “freaks” who didn’t get along, but their heroism was never in question, whereas these characters feel too ashamed to consider the possibility that they can be a light in the darkness rather than darkness itself. For all the action and jokes, Thunderbolts* sings because it’s unafraid to embrace the kind of earnestness that even great Marvel movies like Thor: Ragnarok attempt to eschew.
I imagine there will be those who are no longer interested in what Marvel is selling, and that’s fine. We’re on Movie #36 in the MCU, and it’s easier to dismiss every new installment as slop from the slop factory. Sometimes that’s true. Brave New World felt clumsily stitched together to shamble towards some kind of forgettable existence, an exercise in housekeeping plot points from mediocre Marvel movies. But Thunderbolts* has a clear vision of what it’s trying to do and hits the mark wonderfully. It’s still a Marvel movie—mass blockbuster entertainment in a franchise mold—but we know what the looks like when it’s done well and when it’s done poorly. Thunderbolts* is what happens when Marvel has the right cast and the right story rather than cranking out empty fan service or laboring over tying off every loose end. It’s too soon to say “Marvel is back,” but fittingly, Thunderbolts* feels like some much-needed light after a dark period for the studio.
In Marvel’s defense, they “were on meth at the time!”