[FEDERALLY MANDATED SPOILER ALERT FOR A MOVIE EVERYONE WHO CARES HAS ALREADY SEEN]
It has been a decade since I’ve written about literally any Marvel movie. From a professional standpoint, I never actually needed to, because those days have long since passed. But I’m kinda glad, because for the most part, there’s just nothing interesting to say. Unless you’re going to litigate the MCU’s relationship with itself, what exactly is there to talk about? I actually tried to write up Endgame for this blog back in 2019, and it’s still sitting in my drafts folder, finished but unpublished, because I realized the whole thing was just me being a nitpicky nerd and complaining about the movie missing so many easy layups. (It’s fine. Endgame is… It’s fine.)
So color me surprised when I came home from Thunderbolts* and actually felt compelled to sit down at the computer and bang something out. That hasn’t happened in a long time.
Above all else, Marvel’s Thunderbolts*: An MCU Product, is an overwhelmingly sad movie. As we meet our main character, Yelena (Florence Pugh), she tells us that the Avengers are long gone and that her life now consists of one contract kill after another and little else. She does odd jobs for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), she goes home, and that’s it. She has no friends; her sister Scarlett Johansson is dead; she hasn’t spoken to her father in over a year. Shit’s been bleak.
Valentina gives Yelena one last job: To go to her secret bunker in the Utah desert and clean up any evidence of her involvement in a secret project known only as “Sentry”. Once in the bunker, Yelena runs afoul of a handful of other mercenaries Valentina sent to take each other out. Yelena’s target is Ant-Man & The Wasp‘s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who’s there to take out Black Widow‘s Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), who in turn is there to take out The Falcon & The Winter Soldier‘s US Agent, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who’s there to take out Yelena. During the ensuing fight they accidentally release a Sentry test subject known only as Bob (Lewis Pullman, reprising his role from Top Gun Maverick), who seems like a nice enough guy, only with a crippling bipolar disorder. The gang quickly realize Valentina sent them all there to blow the whole thing up and get rid of all of them. Beating a hasty retreat the gang meets up with Yelena’s ersatz father Alexei, The Red Guardian (perennial MVP David Harbour) and freshman Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).
The team now in place, they explain to Bucky that Bob and this Sentry business are bad fuckin’ news, which is exactly the juicy tidbit he’d been looking for to nail Valentina to the floor in her upcoming impeachment hearing. Traveling back to New York City to confront her (at the old Avengers building, now repurposed as her own personal headquarters), she unleashes her newest plaything: Bob, now wearing a full superhero costume and calling himself Sentry. Valentina explains that the serum they gave Bob has turned him into an indestructible superhuman more powerful than all the Avengers combined. Bob reasons that since Thor, a literal god, was among the Avengers, that makes him also akin to a god, and above things like taking orders from shady creeps like Valentina. The killswitch is triggered, causing Bob to become The Void, an unstoppable being of pure negative space, who zaps individuals out of existence and now threatens to engulf the entire city.
Gee, if only there were some heroes around to stop all this, right? Yelena rightly realizes that this team of people whose powers all involve shooting things can’t tangle with the likes of this. Zooming out a bit, and you realize that this movie does indeed star three fake Captain Americas, two fake Black Widows, and a fake Kitty Pryde. Not exactly the varsity squad of Marvel heroes. And while the team-up of misfit nobodies feels fairly boilerplate1, when the movie takes the time to settle down and let us spend time with these people, we come to find out just what the movie has on its mind.
Yelena’s monologue to us about how lonely and depressing her life is? I’ve seen several critics reading Yelena’s dour worldview, her isolation and depression over being a government spook, as the movie trying to comment on the sorry state of the MCU. Like I said above, litigating the franchise’s relationship with itself. And I’m not saying that’s wrong, exactly. It’s pretty obvious to everyone with a pulse that the MCU’s best days are behind it, and what lies ahead feels like an obviously desperate move to sell tickets.
But what I am going to say is that these folks are missing the forest for the trees. Yelena is depressed and lonely, burned out from too many days working a thankless job, coming home, talking to nobody, then doing it all again in the morning. And she’s our protagonist in this story, our audience surrogate, because by and large, most of us feel like that right now. We go to work, we come home, we entertain ourselves in the privacy of our own homes, because there are so few places to go out and do that among friends anymore, and too many of us do this in isolation. And then we turn on the news and see that obvious government malfeasance goes unpunished, because that’s just what it’s like to live in America right now.
Mark Zuckerberg declared recently that “The average American has fewer than three friends.” I don’t know how true that is, exactly, or if Ol’ Zuck is just telling on himself, but I get what he means. How many people outside your immediate family and coworkers do you see and talk to on a regular basis? Personally, that number is lower than I’d like to admit. Outside of the friends I keep up with online, I might go weeks or even months between conversations with real friends in actual meatspace. Now, I realize this is partly on me. As Yelena points out while making up with Alexei, the onus is also on me to reach out as well. I’m part of the problem, but then we all are, aren’t we?
The life of an introvert is kind of lonely, and sometimes that can be a little depressing. Late in the film we witness the Void’s true power, to pull people into a shadow realm where they get to relive some of their most painful memories. But before any of this happens, before we see throngs of people running away from The Void as he zaps people out of existence? People walk around downtown Manhattan and don’t even seem to notice the five people in superhero costumes standing right in front of them. The gang crash their van right through the front door of Valentina’s office building, and car and foot traffic just continue on in the background like nothing even happened. It’s such an obvious detail that I have to believe it was done on purpose. We’re all so isolated, even in public, that we’ve managed to completely tune out the millions of other people living their lives right in front of us. It’s literally a tragedy that this is happening, and none of us even notice or care.
Anyway, back to the weird nightmare factory. For Yelena, her shadow realm involves the death of a loved one and her torturous training in Black Widow School. For Walker, it’s being too caught up in his own hype to care about his own crying child. For Bob, it’s sitting up in his attic while his father physically assaults the rest of his family.
The memories themselves are painful enough, but Yelena sees the same vision over and over, the shadows replaying the same moments on a loop. Because the painful moments are the ones we tend to dwell on the most. That’s how shame and depression work. It’s hard to let those bad memories go. As Yelena claws her way out of one painful memory, the Void hits her with another, and another, until we finally see her leaning up against a bathtub, confronting her with her own shame of being some kind of drug addict. (This being a Disney movie, the specifics are left a little fuzzy to maintain a solid PG-13.)
In a pretty hamfisted visual metaphor, Bob and The Void square off inside this shadow realm, and as Bob beats Void to a pulp, his rage threatens to consume him, the inky blackness swallowing him whole. Ultimately, the day is saved when the gang help Bob understand that he doesn’t have to fight the darkness all by himself. Only by letting go and allowing yourself a support network can you hope to overcome your own demons. That’s not a universal fix, of course, but as far as Therapy 101 goes, it’s a solid start. It’s also the same “we’re all stronger together” routine that saved the day in both Guardians of the Galaxy AND Suicide Squad. (Either version.)
Praising any Marvel movie for actually establishing a theme and then following through on it feels like such a backhanded compliment, but then that’s where we are right now. Of all the spaghetti that Marvel has thrown at the wall post-Endgame, Thunderbolts* is up there maybe only Wakanda Forever as a movie that actually has something on its mind beyond setting up whatever comes next. If you got this far and wondered what I actually thought of the movie? I mean, the action’s fine. The jokes are good. Florence Pugh and David Harbour make such a good team that I honestly wish they would lead the entire franchise going forward. As a summer blockbuster, it’s successes are modest, but I think that works in its favor. It’s a movie that isn’t trying to be anything other than ‘just fine’, because that’s all we want out of life right now. The asterisk in Thunderbolts*2 might as well mean the movie’s full title is Please, For The Love Of God, Just Let Me Make It Through The Day Without A Nervous Breakdown: The Movie.
FINAL RATING
3.5 stars (out of 5). S’good.
- The movie hits some of the exact same beats as David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, including offing the least essential team member mere seconds after they’re introduced.
↩︎ - I honestly thought the asterisk was going to be something about how the team isn’t actually named after Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, Former President of These United States. Turns out that’s not where the name comes from at all. In universe, it’s a whole lot dumber than that, but also the asterisk is about how Thunderbolts isn’t actually the title of the movie. Go figure. ↩︎
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