THUNDERBOLTS* REVIEW

“Does a great job fleshing out lesser characters and makes you want to see more of them.”

It’s hard for me not to get super-excited about every one of Marvel’s latest and newest movies, mainly because I’ve been such a big fan and reader of the comics for most of my life, and the studio has generally had more hits than misses… at least until recent years. Calling its newest supergroup movie “Thunderbolts,” is kind of a misnomer to someone who remembers how those characters were introduced in such an innovative way in the comics and how the rug was pulled out at the end of the very first issue.

Marvel’s Thunderbolts – again, I’m not going to keep putting in that stupid effin’ asterisk – is more about following a number of previously-introduced characters, and on paper, it’s very much a direct sequel to Black Widow with a little bit of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier thrown into the mix. More importantly, it introduces Robert Reynolds aka the Sentry into the MCU, another character introduced to the comic in the 2000s, which is important, since that was after Marvel sold off most of the rights to its other characters to various studios. Sony is still stripmining that acquisition, and mostly but not fully doing an okay job of it.

The movie begins with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova about to leap off a sky-high tower, but she’s actually on a mission for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who is now the director of the CIA, but whom we meet as she’s facing a congressional hearing to be impeached. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes – now “Congressman Bucky” – is particularly interested in Valentina’s fate for some reason, though Valentina has also been running a major scientific corporation, and under scrutiny from Congress, she needs to clean up all of her incriminating loose ends. This mission falls on Yelena, who is sent to an installation where she gets into an altercation with Wyatt Russell’s John Walker (aka U.S. Agent), the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). They soon encounter an enigmatic character named “Bob” (Lewis Pullman), but before they can figure things out, Valentina sets out to incinerate the location with everything and everyone in it. Yelena’s father, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, has not been living his best life, essentially driving a limo, and he shows up to help his daughter, soon joined by Bucky.

That’s hopefully as far as I’ll get into spoilers, other than to mention the fact that Valentina is indeed the main villain of the movie, so it differs a little from Captain America: Brave New World, other than it being a government person in power that is causing all sorts of mayhem. Hey, it worked for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and government corruption is so pervasive in the real world, it’s hard not to relate.

The film is directed by Primetime Emmy-winning director Jake Schreier, who has made one smaller indie (Robot and Frank) and a prominent studio adaptation of a novel (Paper Towns), before mostly directing television, though he hasn’t really done anything like this. Thunderbolts is a solid piece of filmmaking that has a much stronger and more focused plot than other recent Marvels, feeling less forced than Captain America: Brave New World, and acting as a solid continuation of a number of stories while setting up the future.

A good portion of the film leans on the humor with the Red Guardian essentially acting as the comedy relief, but then, there are the running themes of the mental health issues faced by Yelena and Bob, whose entire existence is based on someone with an abusive past being given unlimited power. Both Pugh and Lewis Pullman pull off an extremely difficult job of creating characters with real weight and depth amid the action and jokes. It was also nice to see the film giving us more insight into the enigmatic Ghost, who was just not given much depth as the villain of Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as seeing more of Russell’s US Agent, who is at the center of most of the squabbling. Although Geraldine Viswanathan’s role as Valeria’s personal assistant, Melanie, doesn’t seem quite up to what we know she can pull off doing comedy, it’s a character I grew to enjoy as the film went along.

The climactic last act brings all the characters together for a sequence that mirrors the alien invasion sequence from Marvel’s The Avengers, with much of the action similarly taking place around Grand Central Station. That’s a crucial aspect to Thunderbolts and presumably what Marvel was trying to achieve with it.

Thunderbolts is another relatively satisfying MCU entry that will probably fall on the side of being a win, setting things up for upcoming movies and making it one of the rare recent Marvel movies that delivers an end credits sequence that really is worth sticking through the 15 minutes of credits. (Let’s face it — those are few and far between these days.) It does a great job fleshing out lesser characters and makes you want to see more of them without feeling as forced in terms of being a “prequel to a sequel” that’s been such an ongoing issue with Marvel since Avengers: Endgame.

Rating: 7/10

Thunderbolts hits theaters on May 2 with previews on May 1. If you want to know my thoughts on Thunderbolts’ box office, you’ll just have to become a paid subscriber.