REVIEW:
Thunderbolts* is the next Marvel team up movie, following the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Eternals. Only unlike those last two, this one features characters we already know from other movies. Characters who have already been established. And that turns out to be a pretty good thing.
Unlike the Avengers, this movie is filled with B characters. Not a one of them has headlined their own film, and for the most part they have been pretty forgettable. That’s okay though, because the movie knows this, has one with it, and gives many of them the time to actually shine here.
Florence Pugh is the closest we get to having a main character in this movie, and she’s the perfect choice. Her character, Yelena Belova, is dark, disturbed, and relatable. She’s also pretty funny. Speaking of comedy, the other character featured a lot is the Red Guardian, played by David Harbour, and he is consistently funny here, even during semi-serious moment when he’s not necessarily trying to be funny. The Red Guardian here is a big, dumb, naive, and lovable optimist. And he’s surrounded by a sea of negativity and depression from the other members of his team, making his addition just perfect for balance and tone.
So the movie gets the characters and the tone right. What it dodo gets right is most of the story, including a fantastic meeting sequence between the characters that really delivers. There are three acts here, and they start out good, but then get progressively worse. The first act is about that meeting, which happens to be a trap and a setup.
Valentina De La Fontane (Julia Louis Dreyfuss,) the leader who all our protagonists are working for, orders each member of the team to go to the lab headquarters of her company and kill another member who will be there at the same time. This is reminiscent the opening bank robbery scene in the Dark Knight, (the best scene in that movie,) where each clown-mask wearing member of the Joker’s team of bandits is tasked with killing one other member. It’s also similar to the Avengers fighting when they first met (Iron Man and Captain America against Thor.) And the thing is, with both of those movies, these early sequences definitely worked. So these are good models to copy and build from.
The act continues to go strong as our characters realize they need to work together in order to find a way out of Valentina’s booby-trapped maze of a building. At one point Ghost (from Ant Man and the Wasp,) has to go through a wall to open a door to let the other team members out. But there’s a power source preventing her from going through the wall. So first the group needs to find the power source and destroy it. This step by step problem-solving is a lot of fun.
At another point, the team has to climb up a very high elevator shaft-like tunnel. And since none of them can fly, they need to work together to make the climb. It’s all great. The escape from the building sequences last a while, and the longer they last, the more compelling and interesting the movie is. We start to bond with these characters, and understand them, in large part because of the way they are interacting with each other in this small, confined space.
But our characters do get out, and that ends the first of the three acts. Now the team of three (Ghost, John Walker, and Yelena,) are picked up on the road by a limo-driving Red Guardian. Bucky shows up to destroy a convoy that comes after the group, and then he joins the team as well. Now we have two new members joining the others, with Red Guardian and Bucky. Together the group goes to New York to confront Valentina in the former Stark Tower – Avengers building.
This is where the team fights a bunch of Valentina’s guards in the garage, and then meets Sentry, (Bob, the patient they met in the lab earlier,) who is now working due Valentina. Sentry looks great in the yellow and blue costume. All decked out. It’s too bad we only get to see him like this for one scene. If the first act is about the forming of the team, then the second act is about the additions to the team character changes. It’s about bringing Red Guardian, Bucky, and Sentry into the fold.
The third act is where this movie starts to fall apart. Sentry becomes a shadow hovering in the sky as a villain now called Void. In fact, in this three act movie, Bob’s character. Ganges three times. Each act gives him a different look, name, and persona. That idea is pretty cool, and helps make each act feel a little different from the others.
The problem is that this movie opts out of giving us any real action for the climax. Instead they give us one of those would inside a world, hallucination-fantasy endings. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness did it, Wanda-Vision, the Disney plus show did it, even the Avengers Age of Ultron did it with the spells Scarlet Witch was putting on characters. When they go into this world, they confront and have to relive some of their darkest moments from their lives. It feels way too familiar and similar to other MCU endings. And it doesn’t work.
Having a climax that takes place in the subconscious and in nightmares, instead of giving us action, is a huge disappointment. It takes the movie from something that could have been great, (that first act was terrific,) to something lousy and anti-climactic. All of a sudden the movie becomes okay. In the first act they were taking inspiration from some of the better superhero movies, and in the final act, they were taking inspiration from some of the worst ones. What a mistake.
If they had continued with following beats from the Avengers, this could have stayed the course. For example, the ending could have had a battle in the streets of New York City, with Void creating a team of shadow warriors and the Thunderbolts fighting them off. But going into the subconscious, and room after room (kind of like Inception,) is a cop out. We want action from these movies, and that really shouldn’t be such a difficult concept for the filmmakers to understand.
The movie is ultimately good, due to a great opening act, and some characters throughout. Pugh and Harbor really carry it along, her with the emotion and him with the humor. On top of that, the final post credits scene is the best Marvel end credits tag in years. Finally they went back to connecting the tag to other characters from other movies (the last time they did this was with the post credits scene from Shang Chi.)
But a great post credits scene still doesn’t make up for the letdown of a final act and the anti-climactic ending. Sentry looked so great once he donned the outfit, only for them to literally take it away from him just moments later. It’s a constant case of Marvel second guessing themselves and not having confidence to stay with something that’s working. The same can be said of why the ending switches tones from action to meta subconscious. The movie was good, but could have and should have been a whole lot better.