I had no idea what Thunderbolts* was going to be. Specifically, how Marvel was going to treat it. Fantastic 4 is the movie the MCU really needs to work. So…is Thunderbolts*, Marvel’s pivot film, the refuse of Marvel’s bad phase? Or is it going to be a building block towards the better movie future Fantastic 4 hopefully will deliver upon? I grew more skeptical after Captain America: Brave New World, but thankfully, my rating should give you an indicator of what my answer is.
Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) has been in a rut since she lost her big sister (Black Widow), and her dad Red Guardian Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) went zero contact. She clocks in and out and that’s it, working on the lamb for new CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Under pressure from newly elected Senator Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Valentina decides its time to clean up loose ends. She sends Yelena into a remote location to clean up a loose target, sending her on a collision course with other agents like US Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Bob (Lewis Pullman). Yes, Bob.
This is the first time in a long time a Marvel movie seemed to grow of the characters inside of it instead of through some corporate mandate. All of these people have done really bad things. Despite their prodigious skills, the weight of their choices weighs on all of them, especially as people like Valentina use those vulnerabilities to their advantage, hurting the Thunderbolts’s collective self esteem. It’s a vicious spiral, keeping all these people stuck in cycles that don’t really help them overcome their problems, to become happier, better people. Instead they’re isolated, looking for something, anything, to make them feel better. That makes the team building kinda darkly fun, as these hurt people snipe at each other to keep the walls up. But behind it all is that fear and distrust and hurt; each team member has to rely on someone else, maybe for the first time, and that moment of taking a wall down and the possibility of getting burned again would send them all back to those dark places…maybe even worse.
Which brings us to the action, why most people went to the movie. I wonder if Thunderbolts* might start a split in the MCU because of how this film inverts the formula a bit. This is the first movie in a long time where the best action sequence is in the third act, not the first two. The sequences in the beginning and middle are things we’ve seen before: car chases, dark corridor fighting, punching contests, etc….just more generic and worse. But the big third act confrontation really works because of how it ties directly to the characters in the movie, unlike the annoying, ugly CGI battles we’ve seen from Marvel in the recent past. It starts with a great villain power that’s legitimately chilling to watch. The confrontation is even better, similar to the ingenuity of the better Dr. Strange battles, making things get more and more exciting because of the time investment in the characters and the design of the battle. It’s why you cast Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, and take a chance on Lewis Pullman, who really delivers in his big shining moment.
Because of the low, low bar Marvel has been setting since probably Eternals has made people forget that just 5 years ago they could make really great big blockbuster movies. Maybe that 2024 pause was good for them: take a fresh breath, and regroup. Building a movie around Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a good start. Let’s see if Fantastic 4 will deliver on the new hope Thunderbolts* provides.