Thunderbolts*

dir: Jake Scherier

2025

What do people want from superhero films anymore? I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know what studio heads imagine people want, what audiences want, at this stage, after almost everything that can be done, punched, shot or blown up, has been. Icons have been created, have done their bit, have been destroyed, have gone away. We have seen it all, and so anything else becomes just a variation on a theme.

There are no worlds left to conquer, surely?

The thing about success under late stage capitalism is that you can never stop until you become so unsuccessful that you can’t keep going. Then you go bankrupt, then some other entity comes along and strip mines your legacy for exploitable intellectual property that they can then recycle. If Marvel have released 73 movies so far, you get the feeling that they’re never going to stop, like some kind of relentless Terminator, until they’re destroyed. While it’s profitable, and someone somewhere is profiting from it, the rollout continues.

Thunderbolts* is an admission by Marvel that, despite all their grand plans for the future, for an industry that is 95% superhero flicks and 5% Sydney Sweeney / Glenn Powell movies, blowing shit up is pretty redundant. They’re at the stage of saying “Heroes? Tired. Anti-heroes? Inspired!”

The Also Rans. The Put Backs. The Couldabeens. The “And They’re Here, Toos”. Neither heroes nor villains, just characters from a sprawling franchise, ever more convoluted, slotted in to “new” adventures that feel like all the previous adventures.

The easiest pigeon hole to slot this into is the obvious one that we’ve seen at least two times too many before: It’s like Marvel’s Suicide Squad. Bad guys forced by evil government official to work together to beat some threat the real heroes are too busy to address. And, yes, what forces them together is an Amanda Waller-esque shady government figure given the unlikely name of Valentina Allegra De Fontaine, ably played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays the character as slightly more evil than her Selina Meyer character in Veep, but not by much.

She forces them together only because she hopes they’ll kill each other off, seeing as she was using them off the books to protect the little empire she’s built for herself within the US government.

The people themselves, the members of the imaginary team are mostly assassin types, who assassinate people or blow places up as they’re told to. It’s sounds like exciting stuff, but I can imagine that after a while you could get jack of it. It could strike you, after you’ve killed the umpteenth guard or henchman who was just doing their job, that you could be doing something else, something better with your life.

It strikes Yelena (the almost always great Florence Pugh) that her work and her life aren’t balancing. As she chats with a guard she’s disabled and muzzled at a facility in Malaysia about the emptiness of her life, and her lack of joy in what she does, you might wonder as an audience member whether the makers think this is a funny, ironic intro, or whether it’s going to factor in to the rest of the plot.

In fact it’s going to be the whole of the plot. The real villain is depression, the weapons arrayed on the battlefield are trauma and shame, and the power to fight back comes from mutual support, acceptance, forgiving oneself, accepting help from others, and finding meaning together through common purpose.

Doesn’t that sound like a fun after school special?

Did they trick someone into making this? I am not so needy or shallow a person to over-intellectualise something that’s meant as popcorn entertainment just because it has glimmers of thought behind its action. But it seems redundant to argue that this flick is somewhat trying to do something different when everything looks the same as everything else.

The real mystery starts when Yelena, who I guess we call the “new” Black Widow fights US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kent) and Taskmasker (Olga Kurylenko) in a basement somewhere, and they meet a harmless looking guy called Bob (Lewis Pullman). Bob isn’t buff, or wearing a costume or wielding custom weapons: he’s just a guy in a hospital gown, who just happens to have appeared in the basement of a facility that Valentina wants blowed up real good.

The hired goons figure out they’ve been tricked fairly quickly, and that they are all about to die, but not what Bob is doing there. It’ll be a while before they figure it all out, but first they have to escape. I wonder if it will require begrudging teamwork, working together, or some arrogant so and so choosing to go it alone and screw everyone else?
If they ever get to the outside, it’s not like anyone is going to believe them instead of the person who put them in this impeachable position, being Valentina. She knows something about Bob, having sent Yelena to Malaysia in order to eradicate evidence of Bob’s existence.

Also, there’s a large loud Russian guy (David Harbour) who yells every line of dialogue he receives. He might have some affection for Yelena AND he drives a limo for money. And then there’s Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, the guy with an arm of Wakandan vibranium. Sebastian Stan plays the role like he’s bored to be there, but that’s how he’s always played the role. Sure, he should be in better, more credible films, but his paymasters won’t let him rest.

He is a congressman, for some reason. I assume it’s not a good reason. Politics is a mug’s game. Is he the leader? Is the previously mentioned Red Guardian the leader, because he is the largest and yells the loudest. He is the only one who seems happy to be there, because I guess some of the other ones are deeply depressed, though maybe not as depressed as either Yelena or Bob.

Will these crazy kids work together and save the world from, um, them? You may be surprised by the outcome.

It turns out that Bob has deeply serious mental health issues, plus the evil “they” experimented on him too, giving him seemingly endless powers, and for Valentina, he’s the perfect way for her to stay in control. He was who Valentina was waiting for, all along, a lab created superbeing who will, for a few minutes, do as she asks. That’s all that any megalomaniacal woman has ever wanted.

Mere seconds later, he figures out “oh no, wait, I don’t have to answer to her. I can go freelance”

Freelancing is hard though. You really have to go the extra mile to put yourself out there and raise your profile, and keep it going so you can maintain a liveable income.

Thanks to strange, some could even say narratively convenient but somewhat stupid actions, Bob will be released from whatever controls he might have possessed, and bathe the world in literal darkness to match the void within.

Bob has, probably not by design, the ability to experience people’s deep shame and trauma. Instead of showing him “hey, I’m not alone – heaps of other pieces of shit feel absolutely terrible about themselves and the more terrible things they’ve done in their lives” he thinks “everything is terrible, I might as well paint everything black”.

His deep feelings of worthlessness have now manifested in the world, allowing the void to seep through and drain all life from New York. I read somewhere that while the character of Sentry was created by comic book nerds, Bob was based on a friend of the director who has struggled with mental health issues, addiction, the general awfulness of like for people living with bipolar, that kind of thing. I wonder how that friend feels about it all, to have the darkest extrapolations of his inner torment splashed across the screen in a $180 million dollar movie?

But our heroes, no, the people this movie focusses on at least, how can they fight back against something as vast as despair, as ungraspable as shadow?

Not through love, bleh, this is not that kind of superhero flick. It’s a different kind of superhero flick, probably closer to The Care Bears or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It’s not romantic love that’s going to save anyone – it’s a deeply lonely and depressed Yelena admitting that she is drowning in despair as well, but if Bob lets himself succumb to it he will be trapped permanently in the void along with the rest of New York, if not the world. And maybe if they both stop hating themselves for a few minutes, maybe there’s hope for humanity.

As endings go, it makes thematic sense. It kinda resonated with me, even if it was familiar. They stuck with it, and didn’t just let it be resolved through a deus ex machina or some magical out of nowhere save. Sure, it borrows a bit from Spike Jonze / Charlie Kaufman’s earlier films, but it makes a horrifying kind of sense (the shame rooms, I mean). These guys, these seat warmers, these place holders, maybe only know how to punch kick and shoot things, but an ending where they come together to save Bob by risking themselves, well, that works too.

Florence Pugh is great like she always is, and believably plays not the assassin part of the equation, but the emotional part of it, seeming desperately bowed down by her loneliness and lack of connection in her life to other people. That’s why I guess the angle of needing (but still being repulsed by) Alexei / Red Guardian makes a painful kind of sense. He’s the only thing close to a father she even knew, and the only thing close to a relative that remains. You either find David Harbour endearing or grating, but he’s fine here. His goofy and ill-informed enthusiasm fits well with the studied coolness / misery of all the other assassin-y types.

I liked it. It’s probably the most solid Marvel outing since… take yer pick of the other ones. Of course every time someone says that, a fairy gets its wings (torn off), and Marvel greenlight another one of these flicks. They will run it into the ground like they run everything everywhere all at once into the ground and beyond.

As for the mid-credits post-credits ending moments “revelation” about the reason for the asterisk, well, I don’t have time for such nonsense. No-one should care, but, hey, at least it wasn’t created by a bunch of Ais, eh? Hey?

8 times the flick should have been called “New Black Widow and a Bunch of Losers versus Depression” out of 10

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“We're brought up with this belief that there are good guys and there are bad guys, but eventually you come to realise that there are bad guys and there are worse guys.” – not all men, but it’s always men - Thunderbolts*

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2242955289/