Thunderbolts* Really Is Marvel’s Answer to an A24 Movie

The characters in Thunderbolts* (asterisk theirs) are all minor foes and disreputable allies who’ve turned up over the last few years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a Temu version of Captain America who was introduced in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, doesn’t immediately ring a bell, or you’re struggling to recall Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), an antagonist from Ant-Man and the Wasp who can phase through walls — well, that’s the joke. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been relying on deeper and deeper cuts over its two-decade, diminishing-returns sprawl across film and television, but Thunderbolts* turns that elephantine unwieldiness into an asset. If anyone’s invested in Yelena Belova, Red Room-trained former child assassin, it’s not because she’s Black Widow’s adoptive sister, it’s because she’s played by Florence Pugh in a depression hoodie and an extravagant air of Eastern European-tinged malaise. It used to be accepted wisdom that the MCU had turned its characters into the stars, rather than the people playing them. Thunderbolts*, which is miraculously a pretty good movie, proves that a collection of superhero C-listers can carry the day so long as the actors playing them are good and given something to work with.

The attempt to market Thunderbolts*, directed by Beef’s Jake Schreier, via its connections to A24 has smacked of sweaty desperation, but what the studio seems to be trying to say is that, by the standards of the MCU, this installment is basically filled with its answer to character actors. Is that a deranged classification to give Sebastian Stan, who’s never looked sharper-jawed than he does while returning to the role of Bucky Barnes, century-old once-brainwashed super soldier and among the last dwindling ties to the first phase of the franchise? Sure, but it’s not any less true. Barnes makes the most sense he ever has as a standalone character in Thunderbolts*, in which he’s now a freshman congressman (!) involved in trying to expose the wrongs of power-crazed CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, doing Selina Meyer as a supervillain). Barnes looks lost as a politician trying to use the impeachment system instead of super soldier serum-enhanced violence, frustrated with the restrictions of a system that requires evidence its target keeps covering up. Eating takeout off his kitchen counter while his soiled cybernetic arm is being run through the dishwasher, he doesn’t look like a hero being forced to play a normie, but like someone relatably bewildered about what it means to take regular action toward doing the right thing.

The other obvious connection between Thunderbolts* and A24 isn’t its pedigree, but the fact that it’s trying to do a reverse Everything Everywhere All At Once. Where the Daniels’ Oscar-winner used the comic-book device of the multiverse to tell a story of dissatisfaction and existential despair, Thunderbolts* makes suicidal ideation the core of its comic-book story. Its own addition to the MCU is Bob (Lewis Pullman, who just has a Bob kind of face), a guy with a history of manic-depression and meth addiction who happened to sign up as a test subject for Valentina’s illicit homegrown superhero program. Yelena, Walker, Ava, and Antonia “Taskmaster” Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) first encounter Bob when Valentina, for whom they’ve all been doing dirty work, dispatches each of them on a mission to a secure the facility where they’re all actually supposed to be killed off. Instead, they reluctantly team up for an escape that amounts to a set of amped-up trust exercises, all the while gradually figuring out that Valentina has managed to give Superman-level abilities to a dude whose internal instability makes that a wildly dangerous proposition. The rest of the ragtag group is not exactly on that level — Yelena drawlingly observes at a certain point in their self-extraction attempt that they all “just punch and shoot” — which sets the movie careening toward a showdown that’s more group therapy than orgy of action.

That a set of lesser anti-heroes going up against a god of depression works at all is thanks to the cast, and to Schreier’s understanding that they’re a better spectacle than standard-issue setpieces, with the exception of a shadow-heavy overhead hallway battle. Pugh, in particular, gives the movie an emotional tangibility that makes it feel realms more solid than the last few years of Marvel product. The MCU first got traction by grounding its outsized storylines in something closer to reality, opting to kick off with Iron Man, a weapons manufacturer whose quest for redemption comes by way of creating his own power using technology. It’s funny that, just as the genre is poised to take a turn back toward the retro-earnest with reboots of the Fantastic Four and Superman, Thunderbolts* arrives with the most superpower-as-metaphor take the MCU has offered yet. But Pugh sells her character’s unhappiness with a rawness that’s improbably poignant, whether Yelena is dryly joking with Bob about how the best way to handle dark feelings is to shove them down, or bickering with her surrogate father Alexei Shostakov (a wonderful David Harbour), who’s declined from homegrown Soviet legend the Red Guardian to bored limo driver. Thunderbolts* recaptures some of the magic of the early Marvel productions, when they felt like some alchemical phenomenon of corporate entertainment, and not just slop. The secret, which should have been obvious, is taking pleasure in the people these movies put on screen, rather than just treating them as marketing materials for future installments.