Marvel movies at this point are like having lunch with an ex: a ghost of the feeling and pleasure that came from seeing them in the past, mildly diverting to see what they’ve been up to while you’ve been busy doing other stuff and growing as a person, and a little bit of a scheduling nightmare, but hey you guys still have some mutuals and it’s good form to kick the tires and make nice, but generally you walk out of the thing a little diminished.
The premise of Thunderbolts is “what if Suicide Squad but Marvel?” which isn’t a terrible plan and yields some zingers like “One day you realize there aren’t good guys and bad guys, there are just bad guys and worse guys.” And I’m generally here for the odd movie where we root for the bad guy–see Andor Season 2 right now and the mesmerizing mess that is Cyril-Deirdre–Deirdril? There’s a backlog of lovable rogues from the Disney+ shows who are champing at the bit to be the new Bucky Barnes fifteen years after Bucky became the bad boy Winter Soldier who kept on punching into the fanfic community’s thirst for homoerotic tension in the most macho of macho man Marvel movies. In a lot of ways, the formula of combining a lot of beloved characters into one mashup film is where the magic of the Marvel franchise really lies, and there are a bunch of reviews of this movie that hold up that element of the film’s kind of limp plot, I’m sure.
This movie is not, as Pugh confusingly suggested in the press tour leading up to the release, an “A-24 movie” and it was a little cringe and bait for her to pretend as much, just like it was weird that they made an entire trailer trying to convince people that a different studio (or a bunch of different studios?) made this movie?
Florence Pugh continues to do an absolute bang up job as Yelena and when she gets to team up with Hawkeye again all our bases will belong to me, but until that happens in a year or two, I will eat the slop. Getting into more spoiler territory, the plot of this film is basically that the shadowy antithesis to Nick Fury who’s been creeping around the edges of the Disney+ MCU is literally on trial for some of her morally dubious projects sponsored by the American government (in what is surely a throwback to the golden days of Phase Two’s skepticism of state power). A bunch of rogue actors are sent to tie up the loose ends of Valentina’s top secret projects, and in the process are hired to eliminate one another Mexican standoff style (very cool fight scene). A random Bob character is added to the mix and he turns out to be a pretty OP government experiment, basically Superman, but called Sentry for copyright reasons. He’s got a split personality and when he touches you you relive the worst moments of your life and kind of flirt with “the void,” which is the most existential moody concept we get out of the movie.
The issue is that almost immediately Yelena’s knee jerk reaction is to be patient, loving, careful, and reassuring as a presence to Bob in his obvious caginess to talk about his backstory, and as a result a lot of the movie is just slow motion closeups of people hugging him and each other, sometimes even hugging themselves in a weird ouroboros of therapytalk on screen, saying “It’s okay” and “I’m here for you” in the absence of more specific, character based speeches. Everyone is reduced to a series of short looping trauma backstory scenes, what Yelena amazingly calls a “city full of interconnected shame rooms,” which is such a funny and cutting encapsulation of what the entire movie devolves into. What that means also is that there isn’t really a villain? Besides shame? For characters we have just met? Or haven’t seen in years? And their Big Bad fight is actually pretty early in the film and then they sort of spend awhile in an Inception-type shadow world without really having to worry about stakes because everyone is either committed to being in Doomsday or they’re C-list characters in the MCU as is and this is just a delight to see them on camera. Anyway, like so so so many MCU movies right now the conflicts and storylines don’t feel cogent and related to one another, don’t feel like we’re building toward Infinity Stones or Secret Wars or an exit from the Multiverse. We feel like we’re just hurtling toward the introduction of new IP with actors who are rapidly aging out of roles or weirdly aging into their roles even though their first mainstream appearance was years ago during the Disney+ pump and dump of television shows every four months.
