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It’s hard not to be cynical about Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. The franchise, having muscled countless independent films out of cinema screens to make more room for its behemoths, now has the audacity to sell their latest instalment as a big-budgeted film with the “feel” of a low-budgeted one, releasing a trailer boasting about how many of its cast and crew have worked on projects released by the average cinephile’s favourite production company, A24. Even its official synopsis declares, with a wink and a nudge, that it’s come courtesy of “a crew of indie veterans who sold out”.
Then again, if you do hire the team behind Netflix’s razor-sharp comedy series Beef (director Jake Schreier, its creator Lee Sung Jin, and one of its writers, The Bear’s co-showrunner Joanna Calo), and actually allow them the space and tools to work – well, logically, you should end up with something fairly decent.
And, so, Thunderbolts* is good. Not “singlehandedly save the Marvel cinematic universe” good, but enough to make those self-declared victims of “superhero fatigue” reconsider that it might not be the genre itself that’s tapped out, but merely the focus on telling stories versus marketing future sequels and the sickly shimmer of nostalgia.
For those unacquainted with the comics, Thunderbolts*, at first, bears the distinctive afterscent of James Gunn, who closed out his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy two years ago and then switched teams to head up the rival DC universe. It assembles an ill-matched squad of antiheroes, here all selected from previous Marvel films: Black Widow’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Red Guardian (David Harbour); franchise mainstay Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan); The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s John Walker (Wyatt Russell); and Ant-Man and the Wasp’s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen).
They squabble, experience a few narrative shocks (more effective if they weren’t already telegraphed by the promotional materials), and eventually bond over the fact they could each break the Guinness World Record for accumulated PTSD. It may basically be Gunn’s formula, but he’s been successful with it because, fundamentally, it works. Take a crew of emotionally repressed characters and have them gradually and tenderly open up and you’ve found a shortcut to drawing in and disarming your audience.
Schreier and his team have here, crucially, added two new ingredients to the mix. One is Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, director of the CIA, who finally cashes in on a series of pointless cameos to reincarnate Veep’s deliciously nasty politician Selina Meyer and in, doing so, earn the internet-bestowed title of “mother”. This time, she’s got cool white streaks in her hair and repeatedly calls her subordinate (Geraldine Viswanathan’s Mel) “good girl”.
The other is Bob (Lewis Pullman), a guy in hospital scrubs the Thunderbolts run into in the underground facility they’ve been sent by Valentina to investigate. She, inevitably, has ulterior motives. He’s not who he seems. Bob is best and most vaguely described as a walking metaphor for bipolar disorder. He’s both well-written and sensitively performed.
And while it’s certainly refreshing to see a Marvel film with this much focus on practical stunt work (Stan’s Bucky is served by a fun, little sequence with a motorcycle, a big gun, and a flying Molotov cocktail), Thunderbolts* is primarily carried by the brute force of Pugh’s trademark frown.
To summarise, Yelena discovered her family were merely an invention to cover for her specialised training as an assassin, which, at one point, she was forced to do under mind control; she then lost her pseudo-sister (Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow), after she punted herself of a cliff to save the universe, then she lost five years of her life, after she became one of the victims of Thanos’s population-halving Snap. She is, understandably, very depressed. But Pugh cuts through the bulls*** and delivers that pain openly and earnestly, all while offering us the first Marvel character to admit they disassociate by endlessly scrolling on their phone.
Thunderbolts* does feel different to what’s come before, not because of those indie credentials, but because it’s the first of its kind to seem genuinely self-aware. We’re repeatedly told that, now the Avengers are gone, the world is lacking in heroes and it’s becoming increasingly clear the old systems don’t work anymore. These are statements that apply equally to Marvel’s frustrated inability to build a new roster post-Endgame, since they refuse to stick by anything that isn’t a box office smash (RIP the Eternals), and to the general, hopeless state of our world. Thunderbolts*, in that odd way, might actually then be the ultimate Marvel film for now.
Dir: Jake Schreier. Starring: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Cert 12A, 128 minutes.
‘Thunderbolts*’ is in cinemas from 1 May
English (US) ·