Much to the chagrin of Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, the name hastily cooked up by another member of the rough-edged new superhero crew in Thunderbolts* is borrowed from the Pee Wee Soccer team of her childhood, which never won a game. That implicit underdog tag is in keeping with a group that’s continually underestimated, dismissed as a bunch of “antisocial losers” by the villain who wants them out of the way. But the asterisk tacked onto the title of this enjoyable Marvel offshoot indicates that the name and its history will not define them.
While a handful of the characters and the actors playing them have appeared in previous entries, there’s a disarming freshness to this first-time assembly, not to mention something even more unexpected: heart. That’s due to an appealing ensemble cast but also to the new blood of a creative team with a distinctive take on the genre.
Chief among them is director Jake Schreier, best known for the Netflix hit Beef, and the screenwriting duo of Eric Pearson, who co-wrote Thor: Ragnarock and Black Widow, and Joanna Calo, another Beef alum whose credits also include multiple episodes of The Bear and BoJack Horseman.
Thunderbolts* by no means reinvents the superhero movie and its pacing isn’t as consistent as it could be. But at a time when Marvel fatigue has taken a bite out of more than one fizzled blockbuster, it’s a relief to watch a comic-book movie in which the smug wisecracking is dialed way down and the characters are given interior dimensions beyond their powers, including a certain emotional fragility. That doesn’t mean there’s any less physical action or threatened destruction, but there’s a kind of back-to-basics innocence here that makes the stakes feel more real.
Yelena is the center of the group and Pugh the movie’s MVP in a performance that expands on the character traits that made her so captivating in Black Widow — the deadpan insouciance but, more notably, the depth of bruised feelings she attempts to hide behind her tactical skills as a trained assassin. If that 2021 film hinged on the repair of frayed surrogate family ties and the contentious but binding hold of sisterhood, Thunderbolts* shows Yelena brooding on the emptiness of her life in the wake of her adoptive sister’s death.
She’s questioning whether the void is just boredom or something bigger as she undertakes a cleanup assignment in a Malaysian lab, eliminating both material and human evidence that can be tied back to CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) through the scientific research company OXE. Yelena feels adrift, prompting her to request that Valentina reassign her to a “more public-facing” position.
The transparently shifty CIA director agrees on the condition that Yelena first destroy one last OXE facility, embedded in a mountain. Valentina’s involvement in experimental injections of super serums into human guinea pigs has made her the target of an impeachment hearing conducted by Congressman Gary (Wendell Pierce). She has her sharp assistant Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) working overtime to clean up the evidence.
Freshman Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), whose Winter Soldier life will be hard to put behind him, is working behind the scenes to help expose Valentina’s malfeasance; he spots a potential asset in Mel.
The familiar team-up element of the MCU formula happens when Yelena finds herself in conflict in an underground vault at the remaining OXE site with John Walker (Wyatt Russell), whom she dubs “the dime-store Captain America”; Ava Starr, aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen); and, in a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance, Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko).
Realizing that Valentina has set them up in a death trap as more potential damage to be removed, the group bands together, taking a dazed and confused lab patient named Bob (Lewis Pullman) along with them as they bust out.
The father figure whose every word prompts an eye-roll from Yelena, Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), turns up to get them out of there in the “Red Guardian” vehicle that he operates as a limo service (“Protecting You From Boring Evening” reads the slogan painted on the door). But when a convoy of tanks threatens to end them as they speed across the desert (Utah serves as a panoramic location), it’s Bucky’s intervention on a motorcycle that saves their asses. Or so it seems.
Marvel Comics obsessives will likely guess the revelations about Bob and the reasons he is separated from the group. But for audiences without that encyclopedic knowledge, developments around the character, and his affinity with Yelena, will be a rewarding part of the story. Beautifully played by Pullman as a sweet-natured, broken man struggling to outrun his troubled past, Bob is a complex figure through which the movie explores mental instability and the fight between light and darkness.
The screenplay’s introduction of “interconnected shame rooms,” where characters get stuck in painful memories from their past — Yelena’s lingering trauma from her training as a childhood assassin; John’s sorrowful separation from his wife and child — dips perhaps a little heavy-handedly into textbook psychology. But having them confront their emotional debris gives them satisfying depths that enrich the experience of the movie.
The destructive forces unleashed on New York allow the Thunderbolts to shake off their disillusionment and rediscover the joy of heroism, something of which Harbour’s Russian super soldier, Red Guardian, says, “There is no higher calling.” Leaning into the goofball aspects of the character — and the amusingly chewy accent — Harbour gets many of the funniest lines, at one point telling Yelena: “The light inside you is dim, even by Eastern European standards.”
The ways in which mayhem is visited upon the city and thwarted almost feel like a throwback to vintage Superman and Batman films, before mass CG destruction pretty much pummeled any visceral excitement out of the superhero genre. Just watching characters block falling slabs of concrete or hurtling cars, whisking New Yorkers out of the way to safety in the nick of time, is refreshing after so many movies with actors stuck in front of green screens battling annihilation beams from space.
The change of aesthetic clearly is the result of a creative team not plucked from the usual MCU stable, including talented cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, who brought such distinctive visuals to the David Lowery films A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Instead of the usual bland plastic sheen, he gives us a movie with grit and texture, echoed in the details of Grace Yun’s sets. And the score by experimental group Son Lux is a welcome shift away from orchestral bombast into more nuanced territory.
Pugh proves herself more than capable of leading a Marvel joint and this is very much her movie, though the entire ensemble play crucial parts, in keeping with the story’s ethos. The banter among the Thunderbolts is droll without ever trying too hard, and snippy without ever putting the team’s unity in doubt. That carries through to the requisite post-credits sequence, which lays groundwork for the next installment, just as the coda on Black Widow suggested a core element of this one.
Stan, Russell, John-Kamen and Harbour all get to find new colors in roles they have played in previous MCU installments. Louis-Dreyfus, while never quite escaping the shameless persona of Selina Meyer (maybe it’s just seeing her back in Washington), clearly relishes power-hungry Valentina’s ruthless villainy and her political opportunism, without sacrificing the humor. Viswanathan, one of few saving graces in Ethan Coen’s painful Drive-Away Dolls, is a very likeable presence with potential for future developments. And as the most significant addition, Pullman is wonderful.
Whether Thunderbolts* can rescue the MCU from its doldrums remains to be seen when audiences weigh in. But it at least seems a step in the direction of creative renewal.
