Even for a self-professed fanboy like myself, Marvel has been on the schneid for awhile. They’ve had hits (Deadpool & Wolverine, Guardians 3) interspersed with misses (The Marvels, Ant-Man 3), and you have to go back to 2022 since they were reliably making money hand-over-fist on a regular basis. Thunderbolts* (yes, the asterisk is on purpose, gotta see the movie) attempts to right the ship. It’s a great start, and hopefully a springboard to continued success.
The film begins on Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who has not recovered from the death of her sister Natasha Romanoff (the Black Widow) from 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Yelena has been running covert missions for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and while still great at her job, she’s just going through the motions. Her latest mission is to follow a target to a secret base and kill her, but it’s a set up from de Fontaine. Under threat of impeachment in Congress, de Fontaine is tying up loose ends and trying to get her secret agents to kill each other. They consist of Yelena, John Walker (the short-lived Captain America from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko, from Black Widow), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen, from Ant-Man and the Wasp). Once they realize they’ve been set up, they stop trying to kill each other, and work together to get to de Fontaine. They are joined along the way by Yelena’s father, former Soviet super soldier Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the Winder Soldier himself, who has since become a congressman and who has suspected de Fontaine of dirty deeds all along. They have one more in their team, “Bob,” who seems to be the subject of some of de Fontaine’s human experiments, and who will play a big part in the film before the end.
The movie has plenty of action to satisfy superhero genre fans, lots of humor in all the right spots (something that has come off poorly in some of Marvel’s recent entries), and a surprising amount of heart, which is what Marvel really needs in order to capture an audience and keep them coming back. It’s what set Marvel’s films up so high for so long, compared to its DC counterparts. A great cast helps obviously, but the film is well written and well executed, completely missing a lot of the shortcomings that have have plagued Marvel of late. Here’s hoping that there isn’t a miss coming up next! (Which happens to be July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps.) ★★★★★
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