Thunderbolts* review – the best Marvel film in a while

Florence Pugh has become the face of millennial angst, from the tear-inducing cancer journey of We Live in Time, to the ugly-crying murder chaos of Midsommar. No wonder she was chosen to lead a new team of (not-so) superheroes as part of Marvel’s “Phase Four”. The world has gone through a pandemic, and this comic book universe has had its fair share of catastrophe, and Pugh is an actress of the calibre needed to handle the emotional complexity of all that fallout.

Yelena Belova (Pugh) is going through a depressive episode: Her boss (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is mysterious and insane; Her work is unfulfilling; and she’s mourning the death of her sister. Left alone with nothing to do but assassinate targets and dwell on grief and remorse, she decides on a positive “people-facing” career change – to be a proper hero and make her life worth living.

Unfortunately this is easier said than done, especially with wider government conspiracies at play. And so Belova is thrown together with a rag-tag bunch of anti-heroes including three supersoldiers living in the shadow of Captain America, and two similarly adrift (yet talented) murderesses from Ant-Man and Black Widow. There are brilliant elements of comedy – the name Bob is inherently funny, and this is utilised to the max, and Geraldine Viswanathan, who plays a harried but efficient assistant to the Dreyfus’ head of the CIA, is a highlight.

It’s as busy as it sounds, and though they are all given screen-time and cool fight sequences complete with wince-inducing property damage, the other heroines do unfortunately fall by the wayside. The promising Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is relegated to becoming a begrudging British voice of reason without much development, while Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) is criminally underused.

The marketing campaign for Thunderbolts* has been a fascinating change of tack from the behemoth studio, especially this trailer, pointing out the A24 roles of the cast and crew, down to quoting the font and format of the titles from Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness trailer, to emphasise that the Thunderbolts* creative team is different, special, not like other girls.

Plot-wise, like any indie film worth its salt, the real enemy here is depression. This is miles better storytelling than the previous Avengers films, but I fear that’s a low bar. Take Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, who shifted from the Whedon redhead sex icon to being defined by her childlessness and her ability to “fix” the Hulk, to the Russos developing killing her off and not giving her a funeral (while her coworker, Iron Man, got an emotional eulogy) in Endgame. This is the best Marvel film in a while, but it doesn’t quite compete in the bigger leagues of the indie cinema it aspires to.

There are echoes of this emotional crutch energy in Thunderbolts* as the film turns into a two-hander between Pugh and final boss, Lewis Pullman, but thanks to writers from Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, this is the first Marvel film to take mental illness and its psychological toll seriously. It’s also about how living in a lonely violent world can exacerbate those issues.

There’s also some nice nerdy context too. As a girl, I always wanted to know more about the Red Room where the Widows were trained. From glimpses of ballet in Age of Ultron, to a 1940s Widow in Agent Carter, it’s always been a point of fascination. But Yelena’s flashbacks show nothing but abuse, and the horror of betraying her friends. There is nothing romanticised about being turned into a weapon. It’s a sobering and impressive approach, one that is almost too good for a film that can’t fully transcend the MCU requirements of wise-cracking and tying up loose plot ends.

With memorable scenes of laugh-out-loud misfit fun and entertaining dialogue – not to mention some visually striking stunts a la Mission: Impossible – there is a lot of superficial fun to be had watching Thunderbolts*, which hasn’t been the case in the MCU for a long while. Aesthetically, the colour grading carries forward that bizarrely dull MCU grey tinge, but at least in a film that is meant to be rough around the edges, it works.

However, a potentially great film is downgraded to good by its inability to escape the wider Marvel machine. It’s a film that doesn’t quite stand alone thanks to its reliance on recalling back stories and in clumsily setting up Phase Four, makes me wonder how sustainable this sprawling, unwieldy cinematic universe is. The performances and dialogue around trauma are sincere, but undercut by a need for a neat ending and sequel setups.

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