Marvel is back at it again, and so am I! I’ll keep all non-spoilers before the red text, and all privileged information after. Enjoy! Sorry for the late review, I had Finals.

Thunderbolts* stars Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, Laurence Fishburne, Rachel Weisz, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It was directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson, Joanna Calo, and Lee Sung Jin.

Quick Plot Rundown –
Politics! The Contessa, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, needs to clean house and hide all of her illegal wrongdoings from congress or whatever. So she sends some dumb mercenaries in her employ (That all coincidentally have been in movies and TV shows we’ve seen) to a vault to kill each other and subsequently be incinerated with every other incriminating thing. But this backfires, because she’s not that smart. Or she’s careless, more accurately. Which is why these people learn to work together, escape, and form a team. This is all in the trailers, by the way. And then there’s a thing. A thing they all have to fight. And they fight it.

General Non-Spoilery Thoughts –
This was… interesting. I think it’s a solid enough movie? But I’m not really sure. It’s been two weeks since I saw it and I still don’t know. The reviews I saw ahead of time claimed the first two acts were sluggish and somewhat lacked cohesion, but the last act was one of the best in Marvel history. And I can’t really disagree, honestly?

There are good lines in the first two acts, good aspects. Florence Pugh is excellent throughout obviously. We’ll get to that. I really think I need to rewatch it. This is the first time, even when watching shows and movies that I didn’t particularly like, that I genuinely thought to myself, I don’t know if I foresee this franchise lasting much longer. I’m very surprised this is the film that made me think that.

But I couldn’t help but think, with every character interaction, with every odd bit of dialogue, with each new plot development, that I was being forced to take interest in a new dynamic that wouldn’t last beyond the next Avengers movie. And I don’t think enough was done with the team in its current iteration, that the possibilities of the characters were fully actualized. It did feel very manufactured in that way and stopped me from rooting for characters and actors I enjoy. But I’ll get into all of that.

Make no mistake though, this is a step in the right direction. It feels like it’s about something. They may not give every character something to do. But they gave us a movie about depression, about how it breaks people and isolates them. I don’t know if they did an excellent job. But they tried.

Characters –
Yelena Belova – Florence Pugh
She is very much the main character of this whole ordeal, as much as this is meant to be a team movie. Florence Pugh is very good in everything, she acts the hell out of everything. Presumably she was great in that movie about how she killed Morgan Freeman’s daughter that Zach Braff directed while they were dating. And I’ve always liked this character. Black Widow is a fun time good movie. So it’s good to see her back. Most of this movie is about how she’s depressed and she hates her job and her life and she feels suffocated by the monotony. Which I totally sympathize and agree with. But also she kills people for a living and I just finished being super sad in college.
I also think it would have been nice to have a performance like this for the original Black Widow initially rather than two movies of butt shots and sexist jokes and then a creepy bald man implying all women without uteruses are monsters. No shade toward Scarlett Johansson, she’s a good actress. This just works better.

Bucky Barnes – Sebastian Stan
I was disappointed by Bucky in this movie. Sebastian Stan plays him as disaffected and tired. And yet, though he is an excellent actor it is hard to determine whether Bucky is tired or Sebastian Stan is. He’s also not given much to do. He has no real arc. His main character trait in this is he’s a senator or a congressman or some shit and he clearly doesn’t want to be one because he finds it really boring and it’s more fun to beat people up with your metal arm. If I had a tortured past and I was 100+ years old and I had a metal arm, I wouldn’t want to be in politics. Especially if I lived in this heightened superhero universe. Politics suck.

Alexei Shostakov AKA Red Guardian – David Harbour
I mean, excellent. David Harbour is great. I’m a big fan. I’m interested to see what they do with him in the last season of Stranger Things, and how the sequel to Violent Night goes. If I have a main complaint for this character, it’s that they didn’t lean into his obsession with the Winter Soldier, which they hint at in the trailers. I thought we’d get more of that dynamic, especially after that fun episode of What If…? but no, mostly we got Red Guardian as a quirky limo driver and a fun dad. He gives her a great pep talk.

John Walker AKA U.S. Agent – Wyatt Russell
For a man whose main character trait and job in this film is to be a prick, I think he does a good job. He is charismatic. He’s a good actor, like his parents before him. And it’s nice to get “what if Captain America was the worst” which we obviously got an amusing version of in The Boys, but this guy is unlikable without being a complete monster. You can still sort of root for him. I mean, he did decapitate that one guy. And his wife left him. But later in the movie he starts wearing a beret and that’s cool.

Ava Starr AKA Ghost – Hannah John-Kamen
The least utilized in this whole thing. Her main character trait is that she keeps getting chances to abandon everyone but she doesn’t. Because these guys hate each other and they don’t want to be a team. But they also don’t hate each other that much and they’re fine being a team. I like her, I wanted to see her utilized well, especially since she’s the only one with real powers besides Bob. At one point she mentions that she’s never phased through anything for longer than ten seconds, but they never test the limits of that. They only said it to say what she couldn’t do out the gate.

Antonia Dreykov AKA Taskmaster – Olga Kurylenko
Very interesting interpretation. I thought after Black Widow, I’d definitely like to see more of her in this universe. And we definitely have now. She’s not in line with Taskmaster from the comics. But Olga Kurylenko is a good actress and she knows what she’s doing. She breathes life into this film with every scene she’s in. Very much the heart and soul of the team.

Robert “Bob” Reynolds AKA The Sentry – Lewis Pullman
Originally this role was meant to go to Steven Yeun, who would’ve been great, but I also don’t really know how he would have approached the role. He could have easily nailed the depressed junkie thing, I just feel like they would’ve needed to approach the America’s golden boy angle differently. I’ve always loved the character of Sentry in the comics. They needed to make some changes to get him here but I think they did a really solid job. And Lewis Pullman is really good.

Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine – Julia Louis-Dreyfus
I’ve always loved Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She’s one of the greats. Seinfeld, Veep, New Adventures of Old Christine. I haven’t been a huge fan of this version of the character,
I guess. Not that they’ve done much with her. Her main contributions thus far are being a weirdo in Falcon and Winter Soldier and apparently having dated Martin Freeman in Wakanda Forever. Her whole thing as a character in this is she’s meant to be unlikable and constantly evade consequences for her actions.
She does play like the comic book versions of Maxwell Lord, Maria Hill, Amanda Waller, or Peter Gyrich. They’re nuisances that have their own agendas, their own belief systems, but are so belligerent and unlikable in the ways they achieve their goals and stubbornly hate or use superheroes. Particularly recent Amanda Waller and Civil War era Maria Hill. The thing is, these characters can still be well-written while being incredibly frustrating.

Score/Soundtrack –
Don’t really remember this being at all relevant. No song stuck out. I can barely remember the score. Not to talk crap about the person who scored this or put together the soundtrack.

OH MY GOD IT’S THE SPOILER SECTION!!!

THIS ONE MIGHT MATTER FOR ONCE BECAUSE PEOPLE MIGHT ACTUALLY WATCH THIS?!

WHEN I WRITE THIS SECTION I HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE BUT THIS ONE LOOKS GOOD!

BUT WHO KNOWS, SUICIDE SQUAD (2016) LOOKED GOOD AND WE ALL KNOW HOW THAT TURNED OUT!

ANYWAY IT’S TIME TO SPOIL THIS THING AND I AM SO HYPED YOU GUYS!

WHO LIVES?

WHO DIES?

WILL ANYONE ELSE FROM SEINFELD BE IN THIS?

OR MORE IMPORTANTLY, WILL CLARK GREGG COME BACK AS PHIL COULSON AND GIVE US THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE REUNION WE’VE ALWAYS WANTED?!?!

Probably not. Spoilers now.

Thunderbolts* Spoiler Review
There are fourish genuine spoilers for this movie, two of which were basically revealed or assumed during marketing.

One: I was kidding about Taskmaster being the heart and soul. She dies almost instantly, shot in the head by Ghost, even though they were meant to become friends in an initial draft. The Director said they changed it to up the stakes, but I don’t think they really needed that moment? And it’s not like they tricked anyone, she was barely in the marketing.

Two: Bob is the Sentry and the Sentry is evil. Or unstable, at least. And Valentina tries to control him, to present him to the world as the greatest superhero ever, as all the Avengers in one. That’s her thing, she reworks the narrative every chance she gets. So when she finds out her mercenaries survived, and didn’t kill each other or get incinerated, and that this guy was a test subject of her human experimentation trials that survived, she manipulates him into fighting the newly branded Thunderbolts. She uses him to clean up her mess.

But that works for five seconds, and when he tries to rebel, she kills him. And he comes back, as the Void. In the comics the Sentry’s schizophrenia manifests as the Void. He’s his own archenemy. In this he’s the Sentry for five seconds and then he becomes the Void. I like the design of the Void. He’s just a living shadow with two glowing dots for eyes. And he turns most of New York into shadows, making them vanish from reality. Which leads us to spoiler number three.

Three: The third act is not some massive fight. Everyone in New York gets trapped in a traumatic maze of their own worst memories. We only see Yelena and Bob’s trauma mazes, but we’re led to believe that everyone in New York is dealing with this. And the climactic finale is that this semi-team stop Bob from beating up the Void, from hurting the depressed part of him. And they all do a group hug, which I totally saw coming. It made perfect sense with how they set it up. A very good final act. I wanted more of that kind of stuff, I guess.

Four: And after they escape the shadows (Thereby saving all of New York from depression), Valentina does her spin thing and tricks the team into walking into a press conference, where she reveals them to the world as the New Avengers. Which is how they’re now marketing this movie. That’s what the asterisk meant, you see. I’m of two minds about this.

On the one hand, this is a bit of a last minute thing to have a ground team in place when Doomsday hits, presumably to kill them all off easily at the beginning and “set the stakes”. So I can’t really enjoy that these guys are a team now, especially if Secret Wars resets the universe. I don’t think we’ll get a hard reset, but I also don’t think these guys will still be a team when the dust settles. Or at least not the New Avengers. And I want a movie of them being the New Avengers. There are holes in this and missed opportunities, and the fact that some of the most interesting stuff for these characters comes through the credits sequence of articles shitting on the New Avengers and the scene with them as the team (That’s probably just a scene from Doomsday) does not bode well for the longevity of this movie.

On the other hand, I like that they’re the New Avengers because they very clearly should not be.

Has Marvel made a good movie again?
Yes, but with big caveats. It’s an undercooked movie that should have done more and gone bigger. The enjoyment of this movie is mainly derived from the charisma of the stars, the powerful last act, and that great fight scene where the Sentry hands everyone their asses.

Side note because I have nowhere else to mention it, Geraldine Viswanathan plays Valentina’s assistant and brings a bit more to what could be a nothing role. Originally that was meant to be Ayo Edibiri’s role and I’m kinda glad she didn’t do it because she’s a better actress than that and I’d like to maybe see her take on another role down the line if this doesn’t all collapse in on itself. That’s not to shit on Geraldine, she’s great too. I’m bummed we probably won’t see her again.

Like I said, my main complaints are about the script and the editing. Or maybe not the editing. I’m trying to say I think a lot of gold got cut out of this but I don’t think that gold was filmed, I think they cut some good stuff from the script. And there was a lot of dialogue that rubbed me the wrong way, like the writers were trying to write characters based on how they thought Marvel characters should talk. In particular two lines that didn’t need to come up, at one point John Walker says “On your left” but he doesn’t really need to, it’s not woven organically. And there’s a bit where Florence Pugh says not to mention Budapest, and I guess she was there also, but again, the line is completely lost in the chaos.

There’s this whole backstory for Bob where he spent a summer spinning a sign as a chicken while on meth so that memory can come up later, but both the original line and Bob’s lines during that scene are near-impossible to hear. Hmmm. But good. Mostly. I suppose.

What does this set up for the future of Marvel?
There’s a new Avengers team, that’s one. They aren’t that powerful because Sentry can’t do anything without going insane. They have new uniforms and John Walker hasn’t unbent his shield for some reason. And they work out of Avengers Tower, which has access to all the proper satellites they need to use to know that the Fantastic Four is coming. Both the movie and the team, because again, that post credits scene is shot completely differently and is probably part of Doomsday.

Should there be/will there be a sequel?
I would like a sequel that actually does something with the team. And get different writers maybe that can write a line of dialogue that doesn’t begin with one of the main characters reiterating their tragic backstory. That was so damn annoying. I liked the bit where four of them shimmied up a narrow shaft by pressing butt to butt.

Overall Rating – 7/10(Like I said, I enjoyed it, but I would have liked them to do more. Also minor nitpick, but there were serious issues with lines and jokes getting lost in the shuffle during action sequences. I wish they’d have fixed that.)
Rudd Rating – 0/10(He would’ve been incredibly good in this and fit on the team. I’m not saying it would at all make sense to throw him in here, it just would’ve been nice to see him.)

So Marvel is back sort of. We’ll see if Fantastic Four is as good as it looks. Nobody thinks Doomsday will be good. Many people no longer give a shit about seeing the Fox X-Men show up. I don’t know. Right now I care more about James Gunn’s DC universe than the MCU’s upcoming “play it safe” era. Anyway, sorry again this was late. Thanks for reading!