If the Avengers are Marvel’s A-team, the Thunderbolts feel a little like the B-team. In the comics, they were a team of anti-heroes who filled the gap when the Avengers were all killed; in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they’re a ragtag band of Suicide Squad-esque mercs, cobbled together in a series of post-credit stings by the mysterious Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, going full Evil Veep), who is stepping into a (super)power vacuum with dark designs.
Except this superhero team-up is sort of self-assembled, IKEA-style, as befits their scrappy misfit status: solo players forced to work together, to take on threats both human and superhuman. Among them are “dime-store Captain America” John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell); the phase-shifting Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), last seen in 2018’s Ant-Man And The Wasp; and Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), now a down-on-his-luck limo driver largely here to provide comic relief.
Nominally leading the fray are Bucky Barnes (13-year MCU vet Sebastian Stan), balancing political service with T-800-style one-handed shotgun reloads; and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), an über-adept assassin who’s a little lost in life. Pugh has one of the great cinema faces, and her subtle expressions, hinting at deeper wells, were made for IMAX. She deftly flits between house-style glibness (“None of us can fly; we all just punch and shoot”) and unaddressed trauma.
The Marvel faithful will be gratified.
And then there’s Bob (Lewis Pullman), whose true nature is too complex and wild to go into here. But director Jake Schreier — best known for the sweet comic drama Robot & Frank — does well to find human moments among the standard-issue peril, allowing the team to swap stories about gun calibers and super-serum brands. Like the Guardians Of The Galaxy series, this is about a gang of losers forming a found family, though unlike Guardians, the eccentric humour and colourful personalities don’t always land.
It’s also missing a bit of colour — literally, in the washed-out palette and CG shadow-threat that dominates the latter half of the film — and figuratively, in its subject matter. From the monochrome studio logo onwards, subjects alluded to here include suicide, manic depression, domestic violence, and slavery. (And you thought DC was dark.) The mental-health stuff is not always sensitively handled — it seemingly villainises mental instability — but there is an admirable effort to give the film a backbone, and it finds an unusually internal, affecting resolution.
As for that asterisk — the most confounding bit of film title punctuation since V/H/S/2 — well, yes, it is explained. The Marvel faithful will be gratified. There is room for this B-team yet.
