The Marvel series confronts franchise fatigue head on during the opening of Thunderbolts*. While Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) executes a BASE jump off a skyscraper in Malaysia, we hear her complaining about being bored after taking out innumerable nameless armed guards and destroying countless secret facilities where villains are doing research. It’s as if the cinematic universe is asking itself what it can do that’s new with the superhero form. Well, Thunderbolts* is an allegory about depression that comes out several shades darker than the typical Marvel superhero movie. It’s not always good, but it is something new, so heads up.
The beginning of the film finds Yelena still working for Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who is now CIA director, although Congress is doing its best to impeach her. To destroy evidence of her own crimes, Valentina sends Yelena on a mission that is actually a trap designed to kill her, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) in one stroke. There’s also a random dude named Bob (Lewis Pullman), who can’t remember how he got there. Once most of them escape death, they band together along with Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) and freshman Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to prevent Valentina from taking total control of the U.S. government.
Bob quickly goes from tag-along to central character, as he’s been the subject of Valentina’s medical experiments to create her own race of superheroes. When her personal assistant (Geraldine Viswanathan) discovers this, she saliently asks whether it’s a good idea to give superpowers to a manic-depressive drug addict whose feelings of male inadequacy stem from his abusive childhood. Previous movies in this vein have asked whether these gifts accrue to those who deserve them, but never as pointedly as this.
Bob’s superpower turns out to be trapping people inside their own worst memories, and Yelena’s are worse than most. This theoretically best equips her to save Bob from his inner darkness, and I do wish the movie had worked better on this level. The theme was treated better by Everything Everywhere All at Once, and if Thunderbolts* sometimes plays like a derivative version of The Daniels’ multiverse fantasia, it also occasionally achieves a power of its own. The climactic sequence has Bob literally trying to beat his depression into submission and discovering that it doesn’t work that way.
Despite that, it’s the women who run this show. Pugh manages to pitch her performance precisely between Yelena’s unresolved issues and her comic frustration at the group’s lack of cohesion and her dad’s inability to get his act together. Alexei is running a crappy limousine service in D.C., but it is terribly funny when Yelena tears up after his motivational speech to her amid more chaos in New York City.
Louis-Dreyfus, who is having a sneaky great run of roles in her middle years, makes a more-than-capable foil to Yelena playing Valentina as a condescending boss who hides her lust for power behind her precious little wisecracks, and who appeals to Bob’s worst self by asking him whether he wants to be better. Viswanathan is always a welcome presence, and here her turn as a flunky realizing she’s working for the bad guy is given some nice notes of rue and trouble. Alongside them, even a powerful presence like Harbour appears washed out.
Maybe that’s a flaw. A movie about a man whose psychological issues threaten to destroy the world would surely benefit from sharply etched portrayals of not only that man but also the men around him, who have their own flaws and their own perspectives on what he’s going through. Neither the writing nor the performances here are good enough for that, and Marvel has done better by the “group of mismatched parts” scenario before.
For all that, director Jake Schreier (who helmed the low-budget sci-fi movie Robot & Frank a decade ago) does mostly an acceptable job of moving this story along. Even if the climax is too balky for him, he finds a neat overhead angle for Yelena’s early fight sequence in a hallway as she defeats the security guards in an empty space. Then, too, the ending of Thunderbolts* features our group of antiheroes being introduced as the New Avengers, and the press and public greeting them with a collective “puh-leeze.” The Marvel superfranchise is morphing into something new. What that is, is too early to tell yet, but that’s better than repeating the same movie time after time.
Thunderbolts*
Starring Florence Pugh and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Directed by Jake Schreier. Written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo. Rated PG-13.
