Okay, I was wrong about the stupid asterisk thing. I still think the antics with the title are silly and bothersome.
Anyway, "Thunderbolts*" is the best MCU movie since "Avengers: Endgame," though there hasn't been much competition. It collects up an assortment of oddball villains and side characters from several other MCU projects, and shows how they become their own unlikely superhero team. And while it's full of shameless callbacks, especially to the first "Avengers" movie, there are a lot of things that it does surprisingly well.
Yeleva Belova (Florence Pugh), Natasha Romanov's younger adopted sister, is our lead character. She's initially working as a mercenary for the very sketchy Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus), who is finally revealed in this movie to be the director of the CIA. Valentina is being investigated for her involvement in a new supersoldier project called Sentry. While she and her assistant Mel (Geraldine Vishwanathan) are busy getting rid of all the evidence, Yelena is sent to a remote facility to stop an infiltrator from stealing secrets. However, it turns out Valentina has sent Yelena, John Walker aka US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) to the same place with the same orders, intending for them to kill each other, thus wrapping up loose ends. There's also a strange amnesiac guy named Bob (Lewis Pullman) at the facility, who has no idea how he got there.
You can probably work out most of the plot from there. As the bickering antiheroes learn to work together to escape Valentina's hordes of murderous minions, they start to become a team. Yelena's adoptive father Alexei aka the Crimson Guardian (David Harbour) gets involved. So does a recently elected New York congressman, Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), who is doing his own investigation into Valentina's crimes. This is one of the most interconnected MCU installments, but you really don't need much knowledge of anything except the first "Avengers" movie to follow the story. The dialogue is rife with ironic, self-aware banter, punctuated by a lot of spiffy action scenes. All of the "Thunderbolts*" team members are fairly underpowered, low-level fighters, so their fights are pretty grounded, with a lot of hand-to-hand combat. We get a nice car chase sequence, plenty of picturesque shootouts, and the final showdown happens in New York City.
And if you think that this all sounds very rote and familiar so far, you're right. What makes "Thunderbolts*" special is that the whole film turns out to be one big mental health allegory, and it's a good one. From the very first frame, Yelena is depicted struggling with her emotional well-being, and as she's building her team she's also building a support network. The big bad of the movie is referred to as "The Void," and has the most unnerving character design and power set I've seen in a superhero film in a long time. It resembles nothing so much as depression incarnate, which several of the characters are dealing with to various degrees. The movie is surprisingly dark at times, and the discussions of mental health, trauma, and loneliness are handled with refreshing seriousness. It turns out to be very easy to root for the Thunderbolts because they're classic underdogs - criminals and losers and D-listers - who find themselves massively outgunned at every turn. However, the much bigger obstacles are their own flaws, failures, and self-doubt.
So our leads get to have full, interesting arcs in this movie, and come to personal and emotional resolutions that are immensely satisfying. That's practically unheard of in an MCU film. It's so gratifying that the filmmakers understand that Yelena winning a fight isn't nearly as compelling as Yelena making up with Alexei, or Yelena giving Bob a hug when he really needs one. For all the one-liners and cynical quips, there's an earnestness and emotional honesty to these characters that I didn't expect. Florence Pugh anchors the movie and reveals herself to be one of the best actors in the current MCU roster. Julia Louis Dreyfus and David Harbour remain incredibly fun to watch every time they show up onscreen, and I can't help liking Sebastian Stan a little more as Bucky every time I see him. Lewis Pullman is doing just fine, and I hope the rest of the team get more chances to build on their appearances here. Alas, it seems you can't have a superhero team-up movie without a few characters feeling shortchanged.
There are definitely some rough spots, and I suspect I would have liked the movie a bit better with the originally cast Steven Yeun and Ayo Edibiri. Still, I'm looking forward to the next appearance of the Thunderbolts* in the upcoming "Avengers" movie.
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