And then suddenly they were serving up misfires, and turning out for every movie in a series seemed a lot less essential when you knew there was a good chance you'd be sitting down to watch something bad. What Thunderbolts* does - and does well - is reset the quality counter. It's not great, but it's good enough: if Marvel can just make another few movies like this, they might really be onto something.
Depressed after the death of her sister and basically just going through the motions of being a professional murderer, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is looking for a change. She's thinking a move to more public facing superheroics might do her good; her employer, shady spy maven Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) sees her as more of a loose end. With political pressure being brought to bear on her in Washington, it's time to tidy up.
When Yelena's next mission turns out to be something of a circular firing squad - with a bunch of fellow shady types including John "U.S. Agent" Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamden) pointing guns at each other - they all realise they've been set up. Figuring out what dazed regular human Bob (Lewis Pullman) is doing there will have to wait: escaping the bunker and getting past the guards is job number one.
Once they do get free, with the help of Yelena's dad Alexi "The Red Guardian" Shostakov (David Harbour), they're still in trouble. Valentina wants them gone; Congressman Bucky "The Winter Soldier" Barnes (Sebastian Stan) wants them to help him take her down. Could there be an even bigger threat lurking in the wings? One that will force this rag-tag group to come together as a team and learn to trust one another? And let's not even get started on the power of love.
Almost none of these characters are original to this film, but there's next to no backstory required, making this feel a lot fresher than most of Marvel's recent output. The usual mix of relatively grounded action and wisecracks is more of the same, but the action generally makes sense and it's surprisingly how well the usual zingers land when they're delivered by decent actors.
The ensemble is Thunderbolts* real strength. Just about everyone here could support a solo feature (c'mon, Dreyfus has already has multiple TV series), while Pugh is a genuine movie star and Marvel doesn't really have a surplus of those. You want to see what happens to these characters, even when it's the usual run of scenes standing around throwing quips at each other; when the post-credit sequence propels them into the next stage of the MCU it's hard not to think "hang on, why can't we just hang out for a while?"
Marvel movies have to be good at what they do because what they do is pretty restricted. The action can't be too violent, the jokes have to be PG, forget about sexual tension. If this feels like a James Gunn movie without James Gunn, that's because he's the first director since Joss Whedon who figured out how to thread this particular needle - the secret ingredient here being sincerity, as it turns out super-powered beings get depressed too.
- Anthony Morris
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