The MCU’s latest is a generic box-ticking exercise designed to pass the time until the next big event.
Hark to the tale of the Thunderbolts*, a ragtag team of antiheroes and villains brought together to do the dirty jobs other heroes won’t touch. Or at least, the dirty jobs The Avengers won’t touch – we’ve just watched Daredevil and The Punisher touch a whole lot of people into early graves in Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ , after all. But Thunderbolts* – there’s an explanation for the asterisk, and it’s not very interesting – is a big screen effort, so their jobs are the kind of dirty suitable for a precocious 12 year old to take in on a trip to the flicks.
Disillusioned assassin Yelena Belova/White Widow (Florence Pugh), disgraced super soldier John Walker/USAgent (Wyatt Russell), thief Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and mercenary Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko in the briefest appearance by a main cast member I have ever seen) find themselves at each other throats when they’re all sent on the same mission by shady CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, pretty much in a whole different movie alongside Australian actor Geraldine Viswanathan as Mel, her assistant). The idea seems to be they off each other; instead, they team up. Joining them are Sebastian Stan‘s Bucky Barnes and David Harbour’s superbly slovenly Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, plus newbie Bob Reynolds/Sentry (Lewis Pullman, very good). Do you care?
Thunderbolts (I am done with the asterisk) has all the ingredients for a good time, but fails to mix them well. Standout performances from Pugh and Pullman help, and a bit of superpowers-as-depression-metaphor business is clever but particularly well realised, but it is all too apparent that the creative team, including director Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank) and screenwriters Eric Pierson and Joanna Calo are struggling to field too many characters. As a result, Russell seems to be playing an entirely different character to the one he did in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Kuylenko picks up a cheque for what most have been half a day’s work, tops, and John-Kamen’s Ghost could have been swapped out for almost any other character with minimal retooling.
It’s not helped by the fact that the film seems so small. Not intimate in scope, mind you – just cheap, with limited locations and lackluster action. It feels like a placeholder – a film whose sole function is to tie up a few dangling plot threads from a handful of other MCU projects while we wait for Fantastic Four: First Steps and Avengers: Doomsday to come down the pike. It comes at a time when the entire MCU seems shaky, and while it isn’t as awkward an entry into the canon as, say, The Eternals, it feels like a film created out of a combination of contractual obligation and financial dictates rather than because there’s a story here that was burning to be told.
It’s a shame, because the cast is great – Stan is in the middle of a great run, with The Apprentice and A Different Man immediately preceding this mess – and the old antiheroes-save-the-day bit is always appealing. But Thunderbolts is way less than the sum of its parts. Bringing Robert Downey Jr back for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday smacked of desperation – a Hail Mary Pass to save a diminishing franchise. Thunderbolts indicates maybe Kevin Feige and friends aren’t desperate enough.
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