The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: Thunderbolts* *

Or The Best of the Worst is Still Bad

The Thunderbolts are not in Thunderbolts* in case you wanted to see that, rest assured, you won’t. What will you see?  Something that came close to but didn’t quite reach; good… enough.

I will reluctantly grant that Marvel at least paid attention to the team’s concept if nothing else.  In comics, the Thunderbolts were formed as a string of B-team heroes that were slapped together when the Avengers and the Fantastic Four were all presumed dead during Onslaught. 

That said, in this particular waste of celluloid, Thunderbolts* is pretty much a ripoff of Suicide Squad.  You have a team of superpowered retards, misfits and anti-heroes that are under the control of the white Amanda Waller.   Which is which? Well the white males are the superpowered retards (if you were thinking otherwise, damn, what were thinking?) The misfit is the Evil Superman Trope, and the antiheroes are, of course, the girls. 

The premise of this film is a very superficial examination of mental health issues surrounding depression.  Which means the film itself is going to be pretty depressing, or at least it should be. You can tell that’s what the director was trying for, it even started with the Marvel logo turning black. But Feige couldn’t stop himself from injecting Marvel jokes or prolonged action sequences whenever there is even a hint that a scene has achieved a proper dramatic tone.

The movie starts by ripping off the pilot episode of Leverage. The White Waller is being investigated by Congress for being light years off the reservation, unsanctioned hits, and insider dealing.

Hobbit Black Widow, Dollar Store Captain America, the Antagonist from Ant-Man and the Wasp 2 You’ve Forgotten About, plus Task Master were doing The White Wallkers’ wet work for her. That makes them a dangerous embarrassment for her.  So she puts all of her rotten eggs in a basket and then drops the basket.  She sends them to a remote warehouse, locks them in, and fires up the incinerators. 

John Walker (the Dollar Store Captain America from Falcon and Winter Soldier) is there to be the stupid white male in those scenes where the Red Guardian isn’t there to be the stupid white male.  He was also constantly berated and humiliated by every single woman in the film to include the one playing his wife.  

Task Master is the only character to be killed in this movie.  I don’t know what happened, but somewhere late in mid-production, it was decided to kill her off. Olga Kurylenko has literally one scene without the mask, then Taskmaster is shot in the head by Ghost (the Ant-Man villainess you don’t remember).  It was the funniest scene in a movie that was usually failing to be funny.  I guess they decided it was better if Yelena was the only one without superpowers, or else Feige got mad at Kurylenko for something trivial. 

Anyway, the remainder of the team screams at each other while John Walker does stupid things because white man.  After enough run time has pointlessly elapsed, they escape along with a Plus One named Bob. It turns out Bob was the result of a super evil science magic that is supposed to take the super soldier serum to the next level.  Bob is Sentry from the comic books, and I’m honestly shocked to say that they got the character right.

Sentry was an Evil Superman cliche from back when that was popular in the two thousands. Sentry was interesting in that he (effectively) had a split personality. His dark side is called Void. 

Void ends up in the clutches of the White Waller, she appeals to his darker half. 

Yelena’s Dad, the Commie Captain America, picks them up in the desert with limo he now drives, and then Bucky shows up to blow up the limo and capture all of them. 

Bucky is now a congressman now, if you saw the last… You know, this is the first of the Marvel movies in a long time that doesn’t really need an entry point.  You don’t care about any of these characters because no one did, so you don’t need to have seen anything else they were in.

Having captured them, Bucky lets them go.  He needs help capturing the White Waller. Who responds by unleashing Sentry, but then Void takes over.  Yes the ending feels very rushed because the pacing is bad. But it was kept under two hours thank Glob so I counted my blessings.

Void has the power of the Big Sad, and he attacks New York with it, covering it with sweeping clinical depression. Surprisingly, New Yorkers do seem to notice the difference. 

Now comes the part of the movie that… I can hardly believe I’m saying this… I liked.  The Thunderbolts use their superpowers to save people in danger.  When was the last time you saw that in a superhero movie?

Yelena has a total breakdown down and then her Dad perks her up with a pep talk.  She confronts her own heart of darkness, and then the Thunderbolts win by giving Sentry a group hug.  Not joking about that. That’s how they won the day. Group hug.

White Waller escapes justice by holding a press conference where she declares the Thunderbolts are the New Avengers (*gag*). And for reasons that are never even glanced at, they go along with it rather than arrest her for being a murderous criminal. 

The traditional post-credit scene featured more Marvel humor, and then the Fantastic Four’s rocket arrives in this universe. 

I dislike Current Year Marvel, and I really hate Current Year Disney, and I know it colors my reviews. I try hard to be even-handed with these mass-produced Marvel entertainment content products.   So, I am being honest with you when I say this is the best of the post-Infinity War movies.  However, that doesn’t mean it’s good or worth watching. Bright and shiny garbage is still garbage

Feige and company were so busy “improving” Captain America 4 that they didn’t have time to “help” this movie.  As a result, it frequently flirts with competence. Marvel special effects have been notoriously garbage tier since the first Black Panther, (this is due to Feige’s constant last-minute reshoots and changes).  But there weren’t any in Thunderbolts.  It got done on time and as far as I can discern, within budget. As a result, enough time was spent on the effects to get them rendered out correctly.

There were some genuinely superb performances. Florence Pugh is an excellent actress and did her level best to deliver an engaging performance. Her father-daughter scenes with Red Guardian were warm and affecting (when Feige wasn’t ruining them). Although her performance was uneven, the scenes where she appears to be phoning it in were all green-screened, suggesting she simply can’t play off of one; she’s not the only actor with that limiter.  Lewis Pullman killed it as Sentry. He showed off a huge range; first as the bumbling Bob, then as the powerful, god like Sentry, and finally as the menacing fallen angel that is Void. His performance couldn’t carry an entire film but damned if he wasn’t trying.

I can’t say that I was looking forward to this movie.  I haven’t looked forward to a Marvel movie in years.  I was anticipating it with all the joy involved in taking care of the garbage.  I don’t dread it, but I don’t enjoy it either. From what I was hearing, I was expecting a basic, competent action hero movie like the first Shazam. 

Turns out that Marvel doesn’t have a prayer of delivering anything as good as the first Shazam.  I was rather surprised with how pathetically awful the bad scenes were. Marvel really can’t help itself, the M-She-U is still in the saddle. Yelena was not a malignantly awful Mary Sue like the usual girl-bosses, but her character was never developed enough to have real emotional resonance.  Marvel still wades in the shallow end. Even when you are getting show-don’t-tell, you are getting conked on the head with blunt force tropes. Characters have little to no depth, and that includes Sentry.  Those are the problems with the good scenes.

The bad scenes aren’t just cringe, they are butt-hole cringe, and there are a lot of them. Red Guardian is a laughing stock of a slob, yet somehow the villainess of the movie monologues her evil plans about “cleaning up Yelena and company” to her Girl-Friday in the back of the car he’s driving.  And what does this super-soldier do? Nothing but sit there, slack-jawed, then drive off to try and find his daughter.  I would’ve driven Valentina someplace remote and told her she is either going to inform me that she will call off my daughter’s incineration or inform me of which body parts she thinks she can most easily live without, because it’s one or the other, really.

Any of the scenes with John Walker are ultra cringe. It’s like they believe the audience can’t forgive him for having been chosen by the government to be the new Captain America instead of Sam Wilson. We can because we don’t care because we didn’t see Falcon and Winter Soldier, and if you did, you’d know John Walker did the right thing.

Bucky was basically sidelined. Ghost, being the former villain, needed the most character development and didn’t get any. Both were underutilized, I assume the same could be said for Taskmaster, which might explain her sudden removal.  Bad enough, they had two characters just taking up space; three might have been bad enough for even Marvel to notice. 

This is the film that supposedly closes out the disastrous Fifth Phase of the MCU. It was called into existence prematurely in a desperate attempt to convince its audience that the Fourth Phase was a minor aberration and that Marvel is back on track.  I won’t deny that it had a few moments here and there if you were willing to dig hard to find them. The final episode of Loki gave him a surprisingly decent send-off. And I guess that’s it.  I can’t think of any others, and when I asked ChatGPT for suggestions, it had to make something up. So it was just a single moment of good enough stuck in a swamp of bad.

The Thunderbolts domestic was just under $75 million, and the FBO topped out at $86 million.  Assuming the marketing was kept within the bounds of sanity, it will only need to make $575 million before it crosses into the black. However, it made $20 million less than the opening weekend of Antman 3, and that cinematic abortion didn’t even break $500 million. 

It wanted to be Guardians of the Galaxy, but director Jake Schreier either couldn’t or wasn’t allowed to deliver that.  It tried to emphasize character over spectacle, but at the end of the day, it’s still a Marvel movie.  

In summary, Thunderbolts* place in the history of what was once (and still is) the biggest franchise in the history of Hollywood will likely be that of a late Indian Summer. Autumn. The season of dying, has come and nearly gone when the temperature rises for a few days, offering a hope of warmer weather ahead - But everyone knows it’s false hope.  By itself, it is a tolerable film, but there is no denying it has to be judged as a part of the whole of the catastrophic failure that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so…

The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Thunderbolts*  (2.6 / 5)

*I had to go back and put in that stupid asterisk everywhere, because technically they are the New Avengers, that’s why Marvel put it in the title.