It’s been a while since I came out of a Marvel movie with anything more than a feeling of having been adequately amused. Like a lot of other nerds and comics fans, I got caught up in the initial rush of not only comic book movies done right, but a comic book universe splashed across the big screen in release after release. We had a roller coaster ride for ten years, with the payoff of Avengers: Endgame to complete it all, and then… it kept going.
(Spoilers for Thunderbolts* below.)
That it kept going wasn’t in itself the problem. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be a solid reason for it to keep going. The success of telling an increasingly coherent story over the first three “phases” of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” necessitated some sort of structure to what came next, but the MCU as such had started with only the vaguest hints of an endgame, whereas the next saga was instantly anticipated but largely left hanging in the movies and television shows, outside of a nebulous concern with the multiverse, a concept broad enough to cover any potential stories but hardly one to stir audience interest.
With a mix of tentative new stars and second-stringers stepping up to prime time, the MCU went on struggling to fill its sizeable shoes, usually managing to deliver that adequate entertainment but increasingly losing the buzz it once had. In this growth-obsessed world, holding steady (or worse, slight declines) don’t cut it. To audiences and studio bosses, the MCU was starting to look a little shabby.
This is the ground that Thunderbolts* steps into. Presenting a collection of Marvel’s broken toys in a story of betrayal and despair, it’s a surprisingly bleak little offering. Yet in contrast to what I’ve heard of the preceding MCU movie (Captain America: Brave New World) it does seem that Thunderbolts* at least knows what it’s about and how to stick to its guns. Because I came out of a showing last weekend not only adequately amused but wholly charmed.
Much of this, of course, is down to Florence Pugh. Playing Yelena Belova, the grieving, self-loathing sister of Scarlet Johansson’s Black Widow, she’s rightly kept at the core of the film, her path towards acceptance and her growing awareness of the suffering of others as important as the occasional beatdowns she inflicts on anyone unlucky enough to get in her way. She’s a magnetic presence, nakedly emotional against the Marvel tendency to be ironically cool.
Along the way, Pugh gets to pinball off (both literally and figuratively) some of those aforementioned broken toys: Wyatt Russell’s U.S. Agent, a similarly self-loathing replacement for Captain America; Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, stuck in a job he can’t stand and desperate to punch someone; Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, a mercenary with phasing powers (and the one character underserved by the story); and especially David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Yelena’s bombastic but failure-addled super soldier father.
And then there’s Bob. Now, I have to admit some bias here. Bob Reynolds, aka the Sentry, is one of the more divisive Marvel characters among fans. Created as a Marvel mirror image of Superman and often used to explore the terror of godlike powers in the hands of an unstable personality, the Sentry rubs some people up the wrong way, especially as his origin retconned him into decades of Marvel continuity. Here, that isn’t a problem, but I have a lingering affection for a character I’ve followed since his creation, and I was fascinated to see how the MCU would treat him.
As it turns out, Thunderbolts*, in the hands of director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, very much knows what it’s about with Bob and his terrifying alter ego. From the very first moments, when he appears amnesiac and confused in the middle of a fight to the death between Yelena and some of the other broken toys, to Yelena’s quickness to ascertain that things aren’t quite right with him and her first instinct being to help, we’re clued into the notion that Bob is important, not just for what he is, but simply for who he is.
So when we get to the grand confrontation with the villain and ensuing punch up that normally marks the denouement of a Marvel movie, Thunderbolts* is ready to start twisting the script. First of all, it’s not much of a fight. The broken toys are hopelessly, hideously outclassed by the Sentry, who even saves their lives during the fight when he might have accidentally killed them instead. Bob, it seems, doesn’t want to kill people he knows, even if the only way some of them know to get through to him is punching.
There’s an oft-quoted Terry Pratchett line that I’m going to mangle here: “Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.” That theme seems to run through the background of the movie—I can’t imagine that at least one of the writers didn’t know that line. The broken toys are treated as things to be discarded by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina, then Bob is treated as a prize to be used (to save her ass) and then discarded when he turns dangerous. It’s treatment that causes only hurt and makes the world worse, and it unleashes the dark flip side of the Sentry, the Void.
This kind of broad-strokes storytelling of the light and dark side of a personality can fall very flat if not handled right, but the movie stays on target. As the Thunderbolts were outmatched before, so they are now. All they can do is try to save people from the Void’s wrathful self hatred (did we forget that the fantasy of the super hero is that someone is coming to save us?), and ultimately try to save Bob from himself.
There is only a little punching at the end of Thunderbolts*, and it’s a terrible thing. The victory of the climax is that we get to a point where punching isn’t necessary. Where the characters realise that it doesn’t help, and that what they are there for is to help. It’s a surprisingly uplifting, lighthearted turn for a movie that spends so long looking at self loathing and despair, but it’s all the more earned for that.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect movie. There’s more than a bit of clunky exposition, certainly more than I was comfortable with, and one or two characters were poorly served by the script, but overall this is one of the bigger Marvel successes in a while. The series as a whole may yet get sucked back down into the maw of chasing those post-Endgame highs, but for now it’s shown that it can still make good use of its broken toys.
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