Deep in its middle age, the MCU has settled into a groove of casual mediocrity. Thunderbolts isn’t terrible—it just treads a well-beaten path with a pronounced yawn. At times, it even drapes itself in the drab dinginess of its dreaded DCEU cousins. So it’s no surprise Thunderbolts earns the same limp C- as The Suicide Squad: mildly amusing, fitfully exciting, and wholly artificial. Despite an all-star cast and hundreds of millions of dollars, this two-hour assault of sound and fury provokes an all-too-familiar reaction: meh.
As per usual, this marbled slab of nerdery comes with an arm’s-length list of crapola you’re expected to watch beforehand. That includes Ant-Man and the Wasp, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and…hell, probably a few others I’ve already forgotten. The MCU is starting to resemble one of those sub shops where the sandwiches are lousy, but hey—punch one more hole on your card and the next hoagie’s free.
Anyway, this flick focuses on Marvel’s island of misfit toys—pitiful antiheroes in various states of personal or professional disarray. Yelena (Florence Pugh), a government assassin, is burned out by her daily grind of aimless, faceless killing. She wants something with more purpose and less anonymity. Put another way: if she can’t have her sister, the late Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), she can at least honor her legacy.
Enter Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who offers Yelena that very shot at redemption. Of course, there’s always a catch: every assassin, thief, or conflicted fixer in a movie like this must face the dreaded One Last Job. In this case, de Fontaine wants a pesky thief taken out before they can break into a top-secret research facility. Complete the mission, and Yelena gets a cushier gig in the public eye.
As everyone knows, that One Last Job is destined to go sideways. At de Fontaine’s secret base, Yelena bumps into John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the disgraced former Captain America from Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Wouldn’t you know it—they’re each other’s target! Toss in Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and it’s clear de Fontaine is staging a Reservoir Dogs standoff, hoping these loose ends take each other out.
While these JV Avengers try to figure out just how badly they’ve been hoodwinked, a new complication pops out of nowhere. His name is Bob (Lewis Pullman), a meek, fidgety young man in tattered scrubs. Now the gang has to piece together Bob’s origin—and what it might mean for them.
From here, Thunderbolts goes exactly where you’d expect. The ragtag outcasts must put aside their differences and become reluctant heroes. Bob’s hem-haw demeanor conceals a few dark secrets. Ms. de Fontaine plays puppet-master. I’m always amazed when movies of such visual ambition and boggling expense can deliver absolutely no narrative surprises. Thunderbolts somehow feels frenetic and lazy at the same time.
And because the script clearly needed a little padding, two familiar faces get swirled into this flavorless frappe. Red Guardian (David Harbour), the Russian counterpart to Captain America and Yelena’s foster father, mostly exists to bellow in a moose-and-squirrel accent and remind Yelena of her fractured childhood. The other returnee is Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), now a freshman congressman (yup, you read that correctly) with growing suspicions about de Fontaine’s black-ops shenanigans.
All that adds up to a tentpole movie that just kinda sits there, like a beige Ford Taurus in an abandoned parking lot. We move from one uninspired action beat to the next. (The one exception is a strong stunt piece on a desert highway.) The entire final act feels oddly derivative of Everything Everywhere All at Once. Worst of all, Marvel clearly wants this to be their Dirty Dozen, but team chemistry amounts to exactly zippo. The bicker and banter feels forced, as if everybody realizes they’re in a story assembled by focus groups.
That’s a shame, because some of Thunderbolts‘ individual pieces outshine the sum total. Pugh excels, both as a Femme Nikita-style badass and as a wounded soul. She also has a great interplay with Harbour, who hulks through the movie like a scraggly, Soviet riff on Mr. Incredible. Louis-Dreyfuss slathers Allegra de Fontaine in the campy sass of a bitchy Disney queen, a bold choice the film desperately needs.
Meanwhile, many other pieces feel shoehorned. Bucky’s subplot crams into an already overstuffed movie. (I love The Winter Soldier, but this was a poor use for him.) Pullman’s Bob serves as a lightning rod for the film’s plot, but his arc gets rushed. Even with all the shows and movies leading up to it, Thunderbolts still can’t supply enough runway for all its characters.
Put that together and you’ll get a cinematic experience that’ll leave you totally…whelmed. Thunderbolts will probably spend eternity in a weird gray area–not bad enough to jeer, but not good enough to rewatch. You know a movie is in trouble when, early on, Yelena sleepily predicts the action beats a step before they happen. Honestly, she probably could’ve done that for the entire movie.
127 min. PG-13. On demand.
