Marvel’s Thunderbolts: A Mid-Tier Marvel Movie
With Marvel Studios’ "Thunderbolts*" (the asterisk denotes a little something worth ceasing all phones at early screenings), the studio offers a strange middle piece to its dwindling self-worth. After a decade-plus of spandex operatics, cosmic showdowns, and multiversal migraines, we’ve arrived at the era of mid-tier misfits and discards. The Avengers are either dead, de-aged, or trapped in development hell. The remaining bench is a set of weary characters staring down the abyss of their own irrelevance.
A former child assassin, a disgraced Captain America knockoff, a super-assassin turned congressman, a haunted quantum blur, a Soviet relic, and a human emotional contagion named Bob. They’ve been shelved, sidelined, and mostly forgotten by their government handlers, by the world they supposedly saved, and, most damningly, by their jaded audiences who’ve long since moved on. What throws "Thunderbolts*" a lifeline in the slow, defibrillator rhythm of a post-"Endgame" Marvel is that Kevin Feige has finally started to admit that the party might just be over.
Director Jake Schreier (of "Robot & Frank" and the 2015 adaptation of John Green’s "Paper Towns") brings a light indie touch to the proceedings. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in the convoluted lore or flashy pyrotechnics of modern superhero fare, and instead, lets his cast rattle around in desaturated corridors and puts them in vulnerable spots. No one could reinvent the MCU at this point, but he does subtly redirect it.
The plot, as is often the case, is the weakest link. CIA head honcho Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose dry wit is underserved by the script) tricks our assorted antiheroes into a mission that’s really a death trap. One by one, they realize they’ve been sent to eliminate each other, and we soon get a slow-burn mutiny of sad-eyed soldiers who would rather hug it out than throw punches, at least most of the time.
David Harbour’s Red Guardian continues his grumpy dad routine with winning goofiness. He gets some of the film’s funniest lines (Yelena’s pee-wee soccer team becomes an ongoing source of oddly affecting pride), but his real role is to tether the film’s sky-high gloom to something earthbound and foolishly tender. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes also reappears, with a more grounded gravitas that reminds you he once had a more engaging storyline. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, still festering from "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," scowls his way through a majority of the film, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost remains half-formed, but that feels appropriate—her power is literally to phase in and out. And Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster "well."
These are characters stuck in a kind of cinematic purgatory. They’re not quite important enough for franchise salvation, but not disposable enough to be killed off. They’re the narrative flotsam of past installments, with enough courage to question what actually happens to a superhero deferred. The action is competent but rarely thrilling, and the color palette leans hard on shadows and grime. But amid the industrial drabness, a freshness takes form, and the characters begin to breathe.
The new wildcard is Lewis Pullman’s Bob, a fragile, mumbling superbeing with the power to make people feel the worst thing about themselves. That his supposedly omnipotent abilities are practically weaponized depression is quite telling. When he loses control, he becomes a living fog of despair, swallowing blocks of Manhattan in shapeless, shadowy grief. It’s a heavy metaphor, but Pullman sells it with a twitchy, wounded sincerity. Bob is the first Marvel character in ages who seems genuinely surprised (and a little terrified) to be in a Marvel movie.
Its actually through Bob that "Thunderbolts*" achieves its most ambitious emotional swing. This rag-tag group of disposable delinquents isn’t trying to stop a bad guy so much as stop being the bad guys, and their arcs aren’t driven by fate or destiny, but by therapy-adjacent self-reflection. In the end, it all leads back to Yelena, whose sardonic emotional register makes her a compelling nucleus. Pugh’s performance builds momentum in silence, and she’s the only one in the ensemble who seems to understand that the real villain is disconnection.
Its messy, meandering, and emotionally lopsided, but "Thunderbolts" feels like it was made by people who wanted to be there. Thats more than can be said for most Marvel projects in recent memory. That "Thunderbolts" feels like a minor miracle in the post-"Endgame" MCU is less a credit to the film itself than a damning verdict on the films that came before it. Its a modest movie, practically allergic to MCU chutzpah, and yet it succeeds where so many others have failed.
"Thunderbolts*" is currently running in theatres.
Reference : https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/thunderbolts-movie-review-marvel-florence-pugh-sebastian-stan-david-harbour-mcu/article69513092.ece
