Released: 1st May
Seen: 9th May
The Marvel Cinematic Universe will forever be a legendary moment in cinema, a franchise like this going for almost 2 decades with film and TV series creating this wide interconnected universe is almost unheard of and has rarely been as well executed as it has been here. Lately though, it feels like the MCU has been in a slump since the insane high of Endgame. Sure, there’ve been some bright spots, but nothing rose to the level of the MCU before Thanos snapped his fingers. It felt like everything was so spread out that it was hard to return to what made this franchise special. So here we find ourselves with another entry in the long-running franchise… and it might be the best one since Endgame and possibly in the top 10 of the entire MCU experiment, it’s that good.
Thunderbolts begins with us following Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) on a secret mission that’s been given to her by the head of the CIA, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The mission goes well enough but being on another secret mission has Yelena wanting to do something that will get her face in the public, which she can do right after she completes one final mission to take out another operative… this backfires and soon results in Yelena teaming up with John Walker AKA Former Captain America (Wyatt Russell), Ava Star AKA Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Antonia Dreykov AKA Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Alexei Shostakov AKA Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to take on Valentina… Oh, they also need to protect Bob (Lewis Pullman), a guy they found while on the mission. I’m sure that he won’t end up being some kind of problem they have to deal with later on.
Thunderbolts had an impossible task, taking the secondary antagonists from some of the lesser movies in the MCU canon and turning them into heroes. Honestly the only one of our central cast who was previously liked by the fanbase might be Yelena because Florence Pugh made her into an incredibly charming character, everyone else was either from a movie people really didn’t like or was such a bastard that the idea of rooting for them in any way seemed impossible… and Thunderbolts pulled it off. Thunderbolts took every one of these characters, explored what made them into the antagonists that we have seen before, allowed them to become something memorable and then made all of them into characters you can’t help but love. They’re terribly flawed, with more emotional baggage than one can imagine, but they go from just being bad people to flawed humans, and it’s a wild trip.
As if that’s not enough, Thunderbolts deals heavily with ideas of depression and mental illness, several big scenes completely revolving around a character’s mental descent into darkness, and it creates some of the most heartbreaking scenes in the MCU. These moments not only give the story a ton of power, creating an interesting villain that isn’t just there to blow up the world, but also let us sneak inside each character’s head to learn their lowest moments. I was a John Walker hater from day one, but seeing his lowest moments presented in this film really gives you a chance to see him in a new light and actually want to see him improve; this goes for all the main cast of characters. It turns them from characters meant to be a temporary opponent into fully fleshed out people you can root for and, surprise, you will.
The visuals that are used to present the core ideas of depression and mental illness are harrowing in the best way. Plunging everything into literal darkness as emotions get going is a fantastic visual trick to let us get in the headspace needed. There’s a ton of truly great visual ideas this film uses that allow it to really sing, a lot of it feels practical, and there’s very little infamous bad Marvel CGI (which usually only happens because of crunch, they took their time for this one). What’s surprising is how intimate Thunderbolts can feel at times, sure it’ll have it’s big action scenes here and there and it’s not afraid to push for the big explosions but it doesn’t need them, heck it’s not afraid to literally just have someone tell the main characters to stop fighting and move onto the next room because there’s a more important emotional beat to deal with.
That emotional element really climaxes in the third act of Thunderbolts, which might be the best final act of any MCU film. Without spoiling anything, it does something very different that has more than a few moments that actually made me well up with tears. It’s not just a big “Everyone has to punch the bad guy until he stops breathing” ending like so many other films in this genre; it does something very different that fits the mental health theme the film is going for. The strong performances and visuals create an ending that will genuinely hit you right in the feelings in the best possible way, something one might not expect from a film with a character as large and campy as the Red Guardian.
Of course, Thunderbolts, like a lot of MCU films, is doing a fair bit of set up for future films, and this one is no different. There’s loose ends from prior films, a couple of big unanswered questions get touched on (like “Who owns the Avengers Tower?”) and there’s a few things that are clearly nuggets being dropped for the next big team up but what’s kind of stunning is that none of these moments are distracting. It never feels like they’re just throwing something in to play to the wider story of the franchise, it fits with this story and you don’t need to know a lot about the rest of the franchise for it all to work. It’s a film that feels a lot more self-contained while still nodding to the bigger picture, which is welcome in this era of the MCU.
Thunderbolts is just stunning, a shock of a film that had everything stacked against it but somehow managed to make it work. Its combination of a clever script, top-notch visuals, a stacked cast and a powerhouse finale all work to make one of the best entries in this long-running franchise. There’s really not much to nitpick about it (at least, nothing that wouldn’t spoil some major moments that I’m trying my best to avoid) because everything just works. It’s proof that there’s still a fair amount of life in the MCU that they can really do something special if they just put their minds to it.
Also, there are two end credit scenes. The second one sets up some of the bigger world-building stuff that might be relevant later on if you’re into that kind of thing.
Movie Meister Reviews 