THUNDERBOLTS*
2025
Directed by Jake Schreier
Written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo
Thunderbolts* has its fun with titling, I suppose, that asterisk intersecting with the film's ending in a way that I won't "reveal," even though as a practical matter we all know what it's doing by this point (it was also used in its post-opening marketing, though Thunderbolts* remains its official title). If I liked the movie more, maybe I'd have found that sort of playfulness legitimately endearing—if I merely respected it more, I'd at least abide it—but as it stands, it's a bit irritating, and I don't think we'll be replicating it faithfully here. But that official title, sans asterisk, has, ever since the shape of the project became clear to me, only prompted the question, "But why Thunderbolts?", since it was instantaneously obvious that the Marvel Cinematic Universe's adaptation of Thunderbolts was going to have precisely fuck-all to do with Marvel Comics' Thunderbolts, and to the extent it did it was only thanks to the big corporate synergy of Marvel being directed back in 2023 to make some new Thunderbolts comics that looked a little more like the movie Disney was insistent on releasing as "Thunderbolts," even when Disney was just going to change the name later anyhow.
It's not the difference between a good movie and a bad one, obviously, but it is awfully rankling: the MCU's whole governing philosophy all these years has been to seize upon all its highest-profile stories and concepts as rapidly as possible, even when rushing them into existence without the scaffolding of continuity to support them was clearly going to be to their detriment, but when it turned out that "Thunderbolts" was a concept that MCU honcho Kevin Feige was willing to entertain, this time they actually did have the necessary scaffolding, not exactly the same as the classic Thunderbolts run, but close to the same difference. What Thunderbolts requires, anyway, is a world that's lost its greatest superheroes, and in the movies, this is essentially the situation as it's stood ever since Avengers: Endgame in 2019, though it suddenly fills me with pity to realize that six years and thirteen films later* we are still talking, and I daresay that Disney itself is still talking, about their Marvel Cinematic Universe as still being in a "post-Endgame era." Nevertheless, as long as we do still have those hollowed-out vibes and that vague sense of apocalyptic collapse to exploit, there's no harm in doing so, and Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley's Thunderbolts sure would've been a fun way to do it, with its new team of superheroes—the Thunderbolts, natch—arriving mysteriously upon the scene to fill the (ahem) void left by the departed Avengers and, being the next best thing, becoming the beloved of the world; and I guess this Thunderbolts is "an adaptation" of that Thunderbolts to this extremely minimal degree, but at the risk of spoiling the end of the first chapter of a twelve-part story in a comic book that came out twenty-eight years ago, those Thunderbolts, in a pretty thunderous twist, turned out to be a collection of the Avengers' worst villains, only masquerading as heroes in a bid to take over the world under the direction of the archfiend who has at least as much right as the Red Skull to be called Captain America's greatest facially-disfigured Nazi villain, Baron Zemo.
At the risk of spoiling a comic book that came out twenty-seven years ago, and then ran another 163 issues under that name, it goes where you'd expect it to, but satisfyingly—and that's a hook, ain't it? Of course, in the MCU, Zemo has only been a plug-n-play plot device, then practically a comic relief figure, and now presumptively abandoned, and these Thunderbolts are not supervillains taking over the world, or seeking redemption, or even donning colorful new identities. They are but the detritus of the MCU, principally from the Captain America and Black Widow franchises, which arguably has its own appeal, though it's pretty limited, and they're not villains, period. The only one who is, Black Widow's demivillain henchwoman Taskmaster, is nothing besides an indication that something horrible happened to Olga Kurylenko's career a few years back that I don't know about, inasmuch as it's plausible that Kurylenko, the actual human woman, filmed literally just one take for this movie she's on the marquee of, and potentially did so in her house (her only facetime is one of those composited-in "nanotech mask comes off for a second" deals). Whatever the case, Taskmaster eats it in a "shock" death that's so ineptly played that I went a long time assuming she wasn't actually dead. So that suggests that what Thunderbolts is, really, is Marvel's attempt to do a Suicide Squad (for some reason), except without the "mission movie" cleanliness and clarity that James Gunn's and even David Ayers's misfit antihero movies had—it'd prefer sometimes to be more like an actual espionage thriller, though this results mainly in an astounding fraction of the movie, at least half, being just the opening scene of Brian De Palma's first Mission: Impossible if it were underwhelming, obvious, and never fucking ended—and what that means is sweeping up a collection of B-lister "superheroes," nearly all of whom functionally have the same powers (eventually, they're gonna keep trying to kill a god with, like, handguns), and the same "tactical superhero" design parameters, and kind of the same "personalities," if, anyway, we accept the screenplay's attempt to beg that last question.
Man, the later seasons of Veep got annoying.
Now, it's always nice when a movie's first scene encapsulates what you're about to watch, and Thunderbolts begins somewhat perfectly in this respect, arguably encapsulating the entire experience of popular cinema for the last two decades: it throws Yelena into an action sequence—she's been tasked with eliminating a rogue mad science faction that de Fontaine's had enough of—over which Pugh narrates, leaving very little of her emotional and psychological state to subtext or implication, while also making trivializing and wan jokes about the tedium of murder. Sucking the energy out of things immediately, some of these jokes begin surfacing into the actual diegesis, such textbook examples of the phrase "genre savvy" that the screenplay tips over into active self-parody, just some of the most sub-Whedonesque joke-writing that this Whedon-defined franchise has ever suffered in its thirty-six film history, Yelena anticipating and then preemptively reciting all of the dialogue of her primary quarry, because her struggle with him is so drearily absent of stakes, and Jesus Christ, for starters, I think they might've straight-up copied an episode of Buffy. But more than that, it's as if, having heard our complaints about Marvel dialogue, they understood that our problem with their house style's yammering/meta tone was that it wasn't alienating and disengaging enough. The one funny part here is, quite possibly, accidental—that if Yelena had bothered listening, instead of being a smug jerk, she could've nipped her movie's world-threatening plot in the bud—but it certainly fulfills its function of preparing you for what Thunderbolts will be like, insofar as it is simultaneously bluntly artless about its story, which is "it's about trauma," several times over, yet still constantly trying to be a funny comedy revolving around snappy backbiting with I doubt a full twenty seconds' worth of silence, pensive or otherwise, across its entire 127 minutes.
It does not properly prepare you for Thunderbolts in one key regard, however, given that this first scene accidentally suggests the rest of the movie might look cool: once past some prefatory business involving Yelena's infiltration of this Malaysian laboratory, Dark Knight parachute-style**, we already have in the first three minutes what may genuinely be the movie's single best shot, involving a view down through the ceiling of the corridor Yelena's battling her way through, with only one light source in it for some reason, thereby casting long shadows down the whole breadth of the widescreen frame. Turns out the next major action scene is just "hey, a filter that makes everything dim and orange, you could describe that as 'style'", but at least it's kind of motivated, which isn't really the case for most of the movie's complexion, cinematographer Andrew Doz Palermo apparently having been instructed to find an entirely new brand of bad for the MCU, and rather gallingly hitting upon an aesthetic that is actually "more cinematic," but arguably uglier than when they were letting it be plain and televisual, just this outright disaster of a grimdark color grade—a misjudgment that erupts right into the narrative, even, considering that the film's baseline ("David Harbour, clad in red, is nonetheless practically a silhouette, in broad daylight, in the desert") leaves director Jake Shreier with basically zero wiggle-room, and Thunderbolts has the most urgent possible need to get very grimdark, literally, on behalf of its finale.
Well, Yelena completes her mission but makes the error of voicing her ennui to de Fontaine, so she's immediately flung into a further "mission" that's exactly what it seems like it is, given that de Fontaine dispatches her to an isolated black site to deal with "a thief" and it certainly doesn't seem like "a thief" would be hanging around so long that Yelena could intervene unless it were, in fact, just a pretext to put her and her "target" alike underneath five or six hundred feet of earth and then bury the both of them. Lo, that's exactly what happens: Yelena catches up with this so-called "thief," Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen, last seen in 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp), whose intangibility powers make her the only member of this whole conclave who isn't just a superstrong commando (and she still dresses the same), and it turns out she's there to kill Yelena. For that matter, Falcon and the Winter Soldier's off-brand Captain America, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and the aforementioned Taskmaster have also been dispatched for broadly identical reasons, and it takes these worldly and cynical supersoldiers a surprisingly long time (and a battle sequence staged more like Halo 3 slayer than a coherent four-sided action scene) to figure out that, yes, it's a trap for all of them, one set up by de Fontaine to tie off all her loose ends as she faces an impeachment investigation that, for our purposes, is being undertaken predominantly by freshman congressman Bucky "The Winter Soldier" Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and, yes, I'm afraid our plot really does depend on this fucking security risk getting elected to our House of Representatives.
Man, the later seasons of Renegade ran out of ideas.
They'll get out and find an ally in Sergei, who's downright stoked to be part of these "Thunderbolts," that name emerging, uh, naturally from the loser soccer team that Yelena played for during her brief childhood stint in the United States with her "dad" (I will not, however, dignify the means by which Sergei finds out where Yelena is by describing them, for this is just some unbelievably contemptuous screenwriting). However, there's even a fifth loose end down here. That's Robert "Bob" Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), and whatever he is, well, it actually takes our worldly and cynical supersoldiers even longer to figure that out. I'm not, in fact, sure what they think he is. An abandoned janitor or something. Mind you, our entire cast are people who got their superpowers from mad science in black site basements.
Of course, my fellow middle-aged nerds will understand the foregoing immediately, but for the rest of you, what it means is that Thunderbolts somehow manages to fail to scrape any of the interesting material out of not one but two crazy high-concept comic books from the turn of the century, Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee's The Sentry being kind of the quintessential "why the fuck did you integrate this into actual continuity?" kind of story, in that it generated most of its potential out of metafictional play and the portent borne by a middle-aged loser who, sure, might have been the greatest superhero but everybody just forgot, or might be having a psychotic breakdown. (Or both.) Here, our Sentry is a complete amnesiac, found wandering this basement and triggering backstory modules in our cast with psychic powers (amusingly, though, for only a portion of that cast: you could remove Ghost from this movie and you'd barely have to rethink the blocking), and coming off altogether strange but more in ways that makes the movie difficult to take seriously than are ever fascinating or mysterious, owing in part to a performance from Pullman that's barely seems like he's even pretending he's in a movie rather than doing behind-the-scenes footage. It's a measure of unreality that for all I know might have been productive in some previous screenplay draft, where Bob wasn't just a maguffin for some other maguffins to chase after (or just another head for hair for department chief Lane Friedman to try to bring the wet look back with, I mean, seriously). This is in tune with the majority of the cast, however, with two effective performances between roughly seven characters, and I'm hesitant to even deem Harbour "effective," rather than just the only actor afforded any opportunity to be distinctive. Either way, he's pure caricature, and this caricature worked better in Black Widow when he was being buttressed by other mutually-supporting caricatures, notably Pugh's. Pugh might be our solitary "actually effective" performance, then, and she's still at half-power, for "Yelena" is better-built to interact with other Borises and Natashas in a bleak-minded family comedy than to interact with the figures who don't even rise to the level of "caricature" in this mismatched-buddies ensemble comedy.
And if that's all been a pretty meandering plot summary, that's unfair to Thunderbolts, which probably needed to be more meandering. Even so, for once in the MCU it feels like we've gotten an attempt at laser focus, which is abortive, but it is how a movie whose paramount need is to establish deep and meaningful relationships between six people is almost literally just two scenes that basically unfold in realtime, these two giant blocks labeled "get out of the basement" and "go to New York to retrieve Bob," only losing whatever momentum that structure might have given it thanks to getting interrupted approximately a dozen times by Tulsi Gabbard up there reminding us over and over that she's venally, uninterestingly evil. It probably does look decent in synopsis, honestly, but it's some inordinately dull, logy stuff, just this clutch of actors swatting one another away for two damn hours, and somehow barely feeling like they're even in the same movie, despite or perhaps because most are so lazily cut from the same cloth—in fact, maybe the fundamental, baseline reason why their dynamic arrives so dead on arrival is that we have our Black Widow, and then several xeroxes of Black Widow (counting Bucky), each being played by significantly less-dedicated performers, plus one cipher saddled with changnesia who's always more aggravating than intriguing. Or maybe it's even simpler, and it's just the dialogue is very bad, sour without much spike—the funniest thing in the movie, and the only thing I laughed aloud at, though I laughed at it for like three straight minutes, is probably unintentional, just the profoundly undercutting and goofy sight of two superheroes having a giant emotional conversation on a New York City street whilst civilians pass by in the background, trying to ignore them—and while it thankfully avoids most of the pitfalls of therapyspeak, despite an open and frankly embarrassing desire that every viewer understand this movie principally through a therapizing lens, this might only be because in their search for characterizations, our Thunderbolts never get to advance beyond a collection of sad, boring summaries.
Man, the later seasons of Kids In the Hall turned serious.
This is a drag, because, breaking from Marvel tradition, I think it does have a right proper ending, or at least a good idea for one; and, just speculating, I'd suggest that they came up with this ending long before they ever came up with a story to get there. It invokes some pretty great imagery (that would have hit even harder, if all the rest of the movie weren't so damn sepulchral too), involving symbolic solid darkness and this downright horror-inflected makeover for Bob, boiling him down to nothing besides the pinpricks of some barely-discernible eyelighting (or the CGI equivalent, anyway) inside a literal void, shortly bounding into a surrealist psychodrama that, ambitiously enough, wants to be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for superheroes. That would even work, if the previous hour and a half that they'd built out in front of this ending didn't assume that I care about sad and broken found families whether they're in a good movie or not.
Score: 5/10
*Or fourteen now, though Thunderbolts was the thirteenth at the time.
**I guess nearly two decades later, it's more "loving homage" than "weird, undisguised rip-off," though it's by no means the last let alone most obvious imagery being stolen from The Dark Knight. The other big one, they do it twice, in case you didn't notice it the first time.
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