‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: A Fledgling Band of Avenger Misfits Disappear Into the MCU Void [C]

It wasn’t that long ago that the MCU was releasing critically acclaimed billion dollar event movies. A lot of digital ink has been devoted to the post-Avengers: Endgame malaise and the string of hits (Deadpool & Wolverine, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) and misses (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Captain America: Brave New World ) that has made up Marvel Studios’ phase five. In the six years since Endgame, the MCU, much like the Avengers themselves, have struggled to find a way forward and Thunderbolts* is the latest effort to guide the ship toward the next big matchup. 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus reprises the role of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who we last saw as the director of the CIA in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.  Valentina has made appearances in other MCU films and TV, but now the cagey troublemaker takes her place as a full-fledged Marvel villain, a corrupt political appointee with a network of off-the-books research facilities and warehouses. Her questionable activities have caught the attention of a few congresspeople (including Sebastian Stan’s freshman Congressman Bucky “The Winter Soldier” Barnes) and Valentina now finds herself at the center of a House impeachment hearing chaired by Congressman Gary (Wendell Pierce). Knowing the government is closing in, Valentina does the logical thing: destroy all the evidence.

In this case, though, the evidence against Valentina is more than just lab reports and computer files. It’s people. And more specifically, some of the misfits she has recruited to do her bidding with the dangled carrots of expunged criminal records and quiet retirements. At the center is Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who fights loneliness and bad guys after losing her sister Natasha, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, who does not appear in this film), in the battle against Thanos. The acrobatic brawls that used to be fun are now empty drudgery for the grief-stricken antihero. 

Yelena stops to see her dad, Alexei/Red Guardian (David Harbour), whom she hasn’t heard from in a year. But she is too caught up in her own grief and depression to notice that the jovial, former Soviet supersoldier is also grappling with anguish and loneliness. One of the big issues with Thunderbolts* becomes clear in this visit. If you have not done your homework, there will be a lot of connecting pieces that are simply lost. The last time we saw Yelena, she was attempting to kill Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner, who also does not appear in this film) in the Disney+ series Hawkeye. She was hired to do it, fed a lot of half-truths and outright lies about Clint’s involvement in Natasha’s death, and eventually learned what really happened. Even after that, she continued working for Valentina, although now she wants something else. After a brief visit with Alexei, she decides she wants to be a front-facing hero, not to work in the shadows but to save people, to help. Valentina is willing to give her what she wants after, of course, one more job.

That one more job takes Yelena to a super secret vault buried deep within a mountain in the Utah desert where she soon encounters Ava/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a costumed agent with the power to disappear and reappear, moving through solid walls and across rooms undetected. First introduced and last seen in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, when her chronic and unmanageable condition was seemingly healed by Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet Van Dyne, Ghost has also been working for Valentina in recent years, although that’s really all we learn about what she has been up to for almost a decade. We learn even less about Olga Kurylenko’s  Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster, who also turns up at Valentina’s bunker. After being relegated to little more than a henchman when introduced in Black Widow, she is dismissed even more egregiously in her second appearance. Taskmaster as a character had so much potential, but to see the way she has been treated by this universe, one can’t help but wonder why she was included in the first place.

Also showing up at the secret site is John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the Captain America reject who took up the mantle in Falcon and the Winter Soldier when Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) didn’t want it. But Walker was no Steve Rodgers and his stint as America’s glittering hero ended with a murder in broad daylight and Walker likewise became one of Valentina’s prized recruits. Wyatt Russell delivers on Walker’s bitter, divorced dad energy, the man who had everything he wanted in his hands and lost it because of his own inability to live up to the legacy established for him. He spits barbed insults at anyone who even looks in his direction, angry at the world for everything he no longer has. 

All attempting to carry out their boss’s orders, Yelena, Ghost, Taskmaster, and Walker immediately start fighting each other in one of many action scenes. The formula for most MCU movies almost parodies itself in Thunderbolts* as we move from a fight to a bit of exposition to another fight, more exposition, another fight, a heartfelt moment, more fighting and then a final fight for the fate of the world. It should be fun to watch these four specific personalities do battle against each other, something like the ego-driven match the first time Iron Man and Thor crossed paths. Instead, it’s a dizzying flutter of activity that we already know is pointless because this is the crew the trailers have promised are going to team up anyway. And it takes far too long for Yelena to connect the dots that they were all sent here by Valentina to kill each other. “We are the evidence and this is the shredder,” she says when they take a minute to regroup.

But then suddenly there is Bob (Lewis Pullman), a nobody who claims to have simply woken up inside this hidden warehouse with no memory of how he got there, but a terrible sense he was involved in something really bad. Pullman is good at playing unassuming, quietly badass regular guys, and he brings an earnestness to another guy named Bob (not unlike his Top Gun: Maverick version), who describes himself as a “meth-addicted, sign-twirling chicken” during a moment of reluctant team bonding. Not quickly enough, it becomes clear that instead of killing each other, they need to join forces to protect Bob, who has powers of some kind, although he still isn’t sure what they are or how to use them.

There is a lot riding on the success of Thunderbolts* and the film itself is not a total disaster. It has some funny moments, a few heartfelt ones, and a Terminator 2 homage that certainly will have audiences cheering. But as the universe – or multiverse – has become this sprawling, unwieldy collection of characters and plotlines, the movies, and especially this one, sacrifice character development and context for fist fights and yet more destruction of New York City. 

Valentina is put up as this symbol of corruption and a government that has gone out of control, answering to no one and having an insane amount of power. It would be helpful to have spent at least a little bit of time exploring how that could have happened in the first place. Instead, she becomes the latest mustache-twirling villain – without an actual mustache. It’s all well and good to get to see a woman be a bad guy for no clear reason. And Louis-Dreyfus is very good at laying on the caring mom pretense to convince people like Bob that she just wants what’s best for them. Similarly, her assistant Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) toys with doing the right thing, but can’t quite commit to a side for reasons that no one involved in crafting this story seem interested in exploring. It’s just not enough after dozens of movies full of bad guys with uninteresting motives.

This is also a poorly developed metaphor for depression and mental illness, messy in its handling of the subject while trying so hard to be deep and poignant. The metaphor centers on Bob, obviously bipolar, who under Valentina’s guidance starts to unlock his own potential as the Sentry, before his darker half gives way to the Void. In a movie that tries to do so much and accomplishes so little, the duality of the superhero/supervillain feels hastily thrown in rather than being the actual point. It is another in a series of unfortunate missteps that befall this movie.

Thunderbolts* lives up to the title of a popcorn movie. It’s mildly entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying, easy to watch and easy to forget. This movie could have been much worse, but should have been much better.

Grade: C

Walt Disney and Marvel Studios will release Thunderbolts* only in theaters and IMAX on May 2.