“Thunderbolts*” is the second of the Marvel films this year and is a proper course correction from some of the issues that have plagued Marvel for the past few years. The film deals with no multiversal occurrences and has the feel of older Marvel films. This leads to the film feeling a little cliche, but it ultimately won me over by the end.
One of the reasons “Thunderbolts*” works so well is due to the ensemble cast. Florence Pugh is really great in the film and is one of the first times in a while that a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) character has felt like an actual human. The same can be said for every character in the film.
The fact that they pulled off creating care about these essentially C-tier characters is pretty impressive. That gives it the feel of the earlier Marvel stuff, most notably the very successful “Guardians of the Galaxy” films that utilize the same band of misfits coming together to beat crime. It is a bit cliche at this point as we have seen it in a lot of these movies, but it still works.
The rest of the cast is also pretty great: Wyatt Russell, David Harbour and Hannah John-Kamen all get their moments to shine. Another pretty grand feat from Marvel as “Thunderbolts*” uses characters from a TV show and a COVID movie to make its main group of heroes. It is impressive how well they make these characters accessible and fun to watch, even if you missed some of these things, something that has been a problem in the past.
All of the cast get their own moment, but besides Pugh, I think the standout is Lewis Pullman as Robert Reynolds. Pullman was pretty great in “Top Gun: Maverick” even without having a ton of screentime, but he is very good in this movie. The split personality role can be hard to pull off, but he does it with ease, balancing the comedic tone while also having his own dark side.
This is where the film starts to get a little bogged down. It is nice for one of these Marvel movies to even attempt to touch on a real-life topic, and the way it handles suicidal ideation and depression is not by any means bad. However, as the film progresses, it starts to think that it is smarter than it actually is. Talking about these themes is very important, but it is something that people have seen a lot of, and it honestly started to feel like a poorly imitated A24 film.
Another aspect that does not work is how much time is spent with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character Valentina. The performance is not bad, but the film spends entirely too much time on this, especially in the first act. The political landscape of the Marvel Universe is not something fans care very deeply about at all, and it slows the rest of a pretty successful film.
The biggest thing about this movie is the filmmakers behind it, however. The director, Jake Schreier, does an incredible job. The action in “Thunderbolts*” is not only fun to watch, but it is also easy to see where everyone is and what they are doing, a problem Marvel has had before. The film is also filmed on practical sets in real places, so the CGI backgrounds are not as apparent and also do not look as awful as other recent projects.
Overall, “Thunderbolts*” is exactly what the MCU needed. It is not a fresh start, and it still has some problems, but it is solid enough to pull people back into the universe. The cast is fun to watch, the action is great, but the story is 50/50. It starts off quite slow, but once the Thunderbolts come together, it picks up and becomes much more fun to watch. It is the return to form that the MCU needed, even if it still is not perfect.
6/10
