Movie Review: Thunderbolts*

It’s been 10 years since the release of director Jake Schreier’s last feature film, the John Green adaptation Paper Towns, which was also only his second. Since then he’s kept busy making music videos and working on TV series, most notably helming the majority of Netflix and A24’s acclaimed hit Beef, though none of his work would make him an obvious choice to lead a Marvel movie, but apparently his pitch to the studio for Thunderbolts* impressed them enough that he got the job. Having now seen it I am equally wowed, as he and screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo have managed to make the MCU feel vital, fresh, and genuinely interesting again.

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is feeling unfulfilled in her life taking care of dirty work for O.X.E. Group and CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). It’s a lonely existence that requires her to do bad things and she yearns to do something good for the world instead. De Fontaine promises her that if she takes care of one last job she can find her something more heroic to handle and so, after meeting with her estranged father Alexei Shostakov a.k.a. Red Guardian (David Harbour), who is struggling himself, she agrees to take the assignment.

When she arrives at the secret O.X.E. facility where her target is expected to be, she finds that John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) were all dispatched there with similar missions to take out each other, leading them to realize that the entire thing was a plot by de Fontaine to have them eliminated. Now trapped in a vault that also appears to be a massive incinerator, they discover the presence of Bob (Lewis Pullman), a troubled young man with no recollection of how he came to be in there. Together they will have to find their way out of the bunker and get their revenge on de Fontaine, while in Washington, now Congressman Buckey Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is also looking for a way to bring her down.

To say anything more would spoil what follows, and this is the first time in a while that an MCU movie goes to some genuinely unexpected places. Thematic and literal darkness pervades much of Thunderbolts* in a way that this franchise is usually afraid of, allowing Schreier and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo to capture some truly haunting images while also generating real, emotional stakes. The movie handles issues like depression and loneliness in a way that blockbusters rarely do, getting us to care about these deeply flawed people and lending the focus on found family some real impact, helped by Son Lux’s standout score.

Of course, none of this would work without the cast and they truly give it their all, whether they’re engaged in some of the best fight and action choreography the series has ever seen or displaying the sort of raw emotion audiences don’t expect from these films. Pugh in particular stuns here, giving the sort of performance that would enter the awards discussion if it were in a different kind of movie.

There are a few moments where the special effects feel like they could have been slightly better, but other than that I struggle to find anything bad to say about Thunderbolts*. The initial setup has some similarities to Guardians of the Galaxy, but otherwise this is one of the franchise’s most thrillingly unique stories. Willing to get surprisingly deep without sacrificing a sense of fun, this is the MCU firing on all cylinders. Not only is it one of the studio’s best films in years, it actually has me once-again excited to see where these movies will take us next. ★★★★★