Marvel’s Most Unexpected Antiheroes Jolt The MCU Back To Life

It’s easy to be cynical about Marvel Studios releases these days. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, after all, has felt adrift since Avengers: Endgame brought an 11-year saga to its glorious, bittersweet end. Apart from a handful of gems, the recent movie offerings from Marvel Studios have ranged from forgettable to outright awful, with fans forced to keep up with the absurd number of characters and storylines through multiple films and Disney+ TV shows. On the surface Thunderbolts*, directed by indie filmmaker Jake Schreier, seems destined to fall into such obscurity with its ensemble of characters, including Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, coming from at least four separate Marvel projects, each of varying levels of quality.

Cynically, you could also say that the collection of characters are arbitrarily connected at best — feeling more like they were thrown together after screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo were given the handful of characters that were still left in the Marvel toybox, and told to make something out of that. Cynically, you could say that Thunderbolts simply picks up ideas that other Marvel projects like WandaVision and Moon Knight have offered before, remixing them and honing them after they were previously flubbed. And cynically, you can say that Thunderbolts* is just another stopgap until the real heavy hitters like Fantastic Four and Avengers take the spotlight. And yet, despite everything it’s got going against it, Thunderbolts* is, surprisingly, really good.

Thunderbolts* kicks off with Yelena Belova (Pugh) standing on the edge — in more ways than one. She’s about to jump off the second tallest building in the world for the latest black-ops mission handed to her by CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). When she jumps — in a breathtaking sequence that Marvel has rightfully pushed to the front of their marketing — for a split second, the movie has you wondering whether she will catch herself. And when she does, smoothly parachuting into one of the building’s floors and casually taking out a hallway full of grunts, you wonder if Yelena was thinking the same thing.

But as she goes through the motions of this latest mission, Yelena comes to a decision: her next covert mission will be her last for Valentina. Valentina, meanwhile, is dealing with the impeachment trial of the century after federal authorities discovered that she had been secretly hoarding resources and conducting covert operations to further the interests of her private company, O.X.E. Corp. With the feds — including freshman Congressman Bucky Barnes (Stan) — nipping at her heels, Valentina hurriedly destroys all the evidence of her indiscretions, which includes Yelena. But Yelena — who thinks she’s being sent on a mission to assassinate the robber of Valentina’s vault of secrets — doesn’t realize she’s about to be disposed of until she’s face-to-face with Valentina’s three other dirty covert operatives: “U.S. Agent” John Walker (Russell), Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and her old foe Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). In the chaos of their fight, the group accidentally awakens Bob (Lewis Pullman), a test subject for Valentina’s failed Sentry program. When they all realize that they’ve been sent to the Vault to be terminated, they are forced to overcome their own lone-wolf ways and team up — with a still-confused Bob — to escape.

All the characters of Thunderbolts* are broken in some way. They all had a terrible past or made terrible mistakes — all of which they accept with a degree of grim resignation. But those dark pasts are brought back to haunt them when they encounter Bob, whose newly gained powers from the experimental Sentry treatment have amplified his own unstable condition, affecting even those around him. And it affects none more than Yelena, who has spent years grieving her lost childhood with her foster father Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian (David Harbour), and then, her lost sibling, Natasha (Scarlett Johansson).

It’s through these characters that Schreier — who shoots Thunderbolts* with a refreshingly tactile touch, complete with real locations and practical effects — navigates a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of depression. It’s rare that you’ll have a mainstream commercial movie focused so heavily on suicidal ideation and depression, nor one that tries to unpack it so sincerely. It’s a tricky metaphor, and one that Thunderbolts* doesn’t always pull off, but one that is elevated by its fantastic performances at the center.

Pugh carries Thunderbolts* with her haunted, resigned performance — easily one of the richer and more nuanced turns in the MCU. But she’s buoyed by the rest of the cast who, despite the ensemble nature of Thunderbolts*, are mostly supporting players to Yelena. Harbour is fantastic as the bombastic Alexei, desperate to recapture his old glory days as both a superhero and as Yelena’s father. Wyatt Russell gives a fantastically jerky, if sometimes one-note turn as the redemption-seeking John Walker. John-Kamen and Kurylenko, who suffer the most from the large ensemble, are still solid. But it’s Lewis Pullman as the stealthy MVP of the movie, playing an alternately fragile and sweet Bob, and his darker, more troubled counterpart.

The plot of Thunderbolts* is fairly simple and straightforward — especially its taut first half that comes straight out of a classic heist movie — but its ideas are much bigger and heavier than anyone would expect. Schreier, Pearson, and Calo are all intensely aware of the kind of expectations that come with putting together a team of misfit antiheroes — the template, after all, was set by Marvel’s own James Gunn with his wildly successful Guardians of the Galaxy movies. It’s a blueprint that all of Hollywood has been desperately trying to recreate for years, and one that Thunderbolts* acknowledges, and even toys with. But wisely, Thunderbolts* goes in a much more thoughtful, surprisingly somber, and at turns surreal, direction. It makes for one of the more thematically rich and meaningful movies of the MCU. Thunderbolts* has something important and profound to say — no asterisk needed.

Thunderbolts opens in theaters May 2.