For Marvel fans, “Thunderbolts*” may well be remembered as the film that got the hobbling MCU franchise back on track — although that’s mostly just wishful thinking from the suckers who’ve been faithfully keeping up with every sequel, spinoff and TV series Marvel pumps into the oversaturated marketplace. They, like the super-successful comics studio, keep hoping to re-create the thrill of the Avengers movies. But those viewing hours are gone forever, and so too is the feeling that keeping up with Marvel was somehow vital to the larger cultural conversation.
For the rest of us, precious few of these movies rise to the level of essential viewing — apart from the self-skewering “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which poked fun at how seriously people take these movies. Ill-advisedly expecting audiences to know (or at least care) about a handful of deep-cut fringe characters, “Thunderbolts” takes place in the same universe saved — and then almost immediately abandoned — by Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Black Widow. Leaning hard into an irreverently humorous tone, director Jake Schreier (“Robot & Frank”) presents the film as a reluctant-allies comedy, grafted onto an earnest allegory about facing personal trauma and working through mental illness as a team.
However frivolous it may sound, Schreier’s scrappy ensemble effort is anything but a one-off (and considering its almost $200 million budget, not so scrappy either). It may star six characters you either forgot about or couldn’t name if your life depended on it, but going forward, you’ll be expected to know who they are and could be quizzed on events that happen in “Thunderbolts” at any time — starting with the asterisk that appears after the title, and the explanation which rewards opening-weekend audiences with spoiling for everyone who catches up with it late.
Meanwhile, that sound you hear isn’t the hype engine, which Disney’s marketing department has ginned up on social media, but the bottom of the barrel being dredged as Marvel Studios exploits a handful of D-list characters before rebooting its proven and most popular heroes (à la upcoming “Fantastic Four” movie). The “dirty half dozen”/“magnificent six” featured here — a mix of hot-headed rejects and randos — can’t agree upon what to call themselves, but have no illusions about one thing: They’re the losers of the MCU.
It’s hard for them to feel otherwise when government secret-keeper Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) strategically gives four of these rogue operatives a mission to eliminate one another. While duking it out in a classified facility far from civilization, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) realize they’re not alone. They’re joined by an amnesiac in scrubs, who identifies himself as Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), but was clearly part of some top-secret experiment or other.
These situations and characters will undoubtedly be familiar to the faithful, even as they prove confusing for those who don’t have a Ph.D in Marvel studies, or else just stopped paying close attention when the MCU train jumped the rails — around the time Phase Three wrapped in 2019. That’s when “Avengers: Endgame” buried several heroes and sent others splintering off into the multiverse of diminishing returns.
“Thunderbolts” doesn’t clearly explain who Yelena is, for example (like her late sister, Black Widow, she has no “powers,” only skills, which include acrobatics, assassinations and alluring eye makeup techniques). A bearded guy named Red Guardian (David Harbour) was like a father figure to her at some point, but now runs a limo service and mopes around his place, dressed in what looks like the Soviet version of a Captain America costume. Marvel honcho Kevin Feige must have big plans for Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the strong-armed sidekick who keeps showing up in these movies, despite having very little to do.
Most of “Thunderbolts” smells like reshoots and ADR-enhanced attempts to steer this lumbering franchise back toward something mainstream audiences might show up to see in theaters. At the core of the film is a villain whom we ought not name — marketing materials have been referring to him simply as “the Void” — but whose dark powers, allegedly “stronger than all of the Avengers rolled into one,” are suggested in the opening seconds (when a shadow passes over the Marvel Studios logo, rendering the flickering-pulp letters an ominous matte black).
Those who follow these story arcs in pulp form will presumably appreciate the movie’s fresh take on a figure who could go either way, toward allyship or destruction. He’s a new addition to the MCU, while the others are all low-level chumps ordered around by Valentina, a “Veep”-like bureaucrat Louis-Dreyfus plays with a shock of white hair in front, a scheming look on her face and just the right dose of “don’t take any of this too seriously” in her voice.
She’s accompanied at all times by her assistant Mel (“Blockers” breakout Geraldine Viswanathan, whose comedic bona fides are another clue to this movie’s tongue-in-cheek tone). For all of one scene, it seems like this motley assortment of antiheroes’ task will be to survive one another. But as Mel tells her boss: “Is it possible they’ve joined forces against you?” Later, in the absence of starrier “supers” (as “The Incredibles” described them), Yelena and her gang of bickering misfits will need to face their own traumas and save their new friend Bob from Valentina’s plans.
That’s about as specific as one can get without giving too much away. At the press screening, Marvel fans seemed to appreciate the first two-thirds of the movie, which runs on that jokey Joss Whedon energy, full of wisecracks about Uber, DoorDash and Dr. Phil. For me, “Thunderbolts” dragged until the Void showed up. Then it started to feel like something else: the kind of modestly budgeted supernatural thriller (à la “Flatliners” or “The Craft”) in which a tormented character could be lost to his own darkness and demons, if not for the intervention of his similarly troubled friends. Unfortunately, it’s all in service of a bad-joke ending (the worst since “Avengers: Infinity War”), meant to fuel this exhausting franchise for another few years (till the Avengers return in 2027).
As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity. The Marvel strategists were smart to anchor the film with Yelena — not because she’s an especially compelling character, but on account of who’s playing her. In Pugh’s hands, Yelena is facing a more relatable identity crisis that your typical Marvel hero. Where her A-list counterparts are burdened by the weight of what “Spider-Man” identified as great power and great responsibility, the Thunderbolts resemble a great many Zoomers: They feel overwhelmed and underappreciated, don’t necessarily recognize or believe in their own powers, and are called to greatness all the same.
Sure, this group’s name is a punchline, lifted from a peewee soccer team that never won a game (the title doesn’t appear until the very end, immediately followed by a different name for this posse). At any rate, supporting one another proves to be as vital as success in this particular mission. And in the absence of the Avengers, they’ll have to do.
