After the blandness of The Marvels, the insufferably hyperactive Deadpool and Wolverine, and the sheer numbing boredom of Captain America Brave New World, I was going into the latest MCU outing Thunderbolts with some trepidatious expectations. Happily, it’s a film that quickly breaks through the scepticism within about the first 20 minutes, full of thoughtful action, snappy-but-not-too-snarky comedy beats, and one of the MCU’s best hero-villain dynamics in the form of Florence Pugh’s ex-Black Widow Yelena Belova vs Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s amoral CIA bigwig Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. It’s a strong start that franchise newbie director Jake Schreier manages to maintain throughout, marking (alongside Guardians of the Galaxy 3), the joint-best entry in the shaky post-Endgame MCU.
Alongside Sebastian Stan returning as Bucky, Pugh leads a ragtag ensemble of reject heroes from some of the recent MCU’s less-loved projects – fake Captain America/real murderer John Walker (Wyatt Russell), forgotten Ant-Man 2 baddie Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Yelena’s ‘dad’ Red Guardian (David Harbour) – as they, of course, fight through their inherent shittiness to become a real super-team. Having these guys front and centre might have meant that Thunderbolts suffered from the homework problem that other recent MCU projects like Multiverse of Madness or The Marvels really did, but Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo do good work in quick and efficient reintroductions.
This is helped a lot by the presence of Bob (Lewis Pullman, playing a mononymed ‘Bob’ for the second time now after Top Gun Maverick), aka The Sentry, the most powerful hero on earth who also happens to be profoundly mentally unstable. Part of his powerset involves (mostly accidentally) trapping people in their own worst memories, so we get to see what fuels our heroes in stylishly, almost theatrically, staged flashbacks. It’s Bob, an experiment-gone-wrong (or maybe *too* right) who drives the plot, the other Thunderbolts originally meeting on a mission to dispose of him that is not-so-secretly a suicide mission orchestrated by Valentina, with the awakening of Bob’s true powers and hidden dark nature setting up the obligatory big superhero final showdown.
From its first announcement, I was sceptical of The Sentry being the ultimate threat for a group of barely-super superheroes, but I’m very happy to be proved wrong. For one, The Sentry, and his dark side The Void, makes for a genuinely threatening presence and it’s in his insurmountable power that Schreier is able to eschew the typical ‘Big Sky Beam’ CG battle. Instead, much of the final third is spent in a psychological showdown that shows Marvel at both its darkest and most uplifting.
Though some of the Therapy Talk dialogue can be pat and generic, Pugh is a great anchor for it to still work. Her performance grounds everything else around her and there isn’t really a weak link anywhere in the cast – Pullman has a tough gig both as the new guy and having to basically give three different performances to be Bob in Bob-mode, Sentry-mode, and Void-mode, but he proves a very worthy addition.
It probably helps that the cast actually get to act on some real sets and locations this time out. Thunderbolts feels like the least green-screen-y Marvel outing in some time and though it is still sometimes guilty of the ‘grey and flat’ house style, when it’s at its best, Schreier pulls off some nice visual tricks, from shadowy hallway fights to desert sunrises to the alarming nuclear shadows left behind when Sentry/Void obliterates someone. It’s not going to win any cinematography awards, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still a major stylistic step up from most Marvel fare.
As a story of assholes-turned-reluctant-heroes who eventually actually quite like being heroes and find an oddly familial connection with one another, Thunderbolts feels like a nice successor to the now-completed Guardians trilogy (and not the Suicide Squad knockoff that I was dreading it might be). It might not reach the real emotional highs of Gunn’s films, but it mostly makes up for that by being far, far better paced than any of those entries were – two hours in the company of Pugh and her merry band of redeemable killers simply flies by.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Good review. I actually liked this movie. Yes, there were a few things that could’ve been done better or rearranged, the end result is still a solid superhero film. Is Thunderbolts the savior of the MCU? No, but it’s a step in the right direction and better than a lot of their recent endeavors of late.