Marvel Roars Back With a New Team

Every superhero carries some sort of emotional baggage. Superman’s parents died when his home planet exploded. Batman’s mother and father were killed by a mugger. Spider-Man lost his parents and his uncle. Wolverine doesn’t even remember his family, or anything else about his former life — except the torturous experiments that gave him an unbreakable skeleton. Show me a long-running comic-book character, I’ll show you someone defined by a tragic backstory.

But so often that’s where it ends; as backstory underpinning selfless deeds. Few comic-book movies make their subjects’ trauma as central to their text as Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, in which the heroes’ fundamental struggle is less against the forces of evil than the psychic scars left by their painful pasts.

The film opens with its central figure, a woman named Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), perched on the roof of an enormous skyscraper as she explains in voiceover that there’s something wrong with her; an “emptiness” that gnaws at her soul. Because this is a Marvel movie, and because Yelena is also known as the super-spy Black Widow, it’s clear when she steps off the edge of this building that it’s all part of some top-secret mission. If it were anyone else in any other movie, it would look like she deliberately jumped to her death — right as her voiceover mentions a “void” in her heart that she can’t seem to fill.

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Yelena does indeed survive the jump. And wouldn’t you know it, by the end of Thunderbolts* she comes face to face with a super-powered individually who is literally named “The Void.” Not subtle. And as I write that description, I recognize that it all sounds slightly insufferable. The fact that Thunderbolts* works as well as it does is a testament to the quality of the script by longtime Marvel writer Eric Pearson and The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo, and to the commitment of the actors generally and Pugh specifically, who fills Yelena’s battles with voids both real and imagined with enormous pathos and a surprising amount of dry humor. As a result, Thunderbolts* always feels like an intimate story about a real person, even as it inches the gargantuan Marvel Cinematic Universe toward its next series of massive crossover films. (A superhero movie with actual human beings in it. What a concept!)

All that said, Thunderbolts* still probably requires (or at least greatly benefits from) some prior knowledge of the MCU; nearly all of its main characters have preciously appeared as sidekicks or secondary antagonists in other films and Disney+ series. That includes Yelena, the sister of the MCU’s first Black Widow played by Scarlett Johansson. Yelena was introduced alongside her father, the Russian hero Red Guardian (David Harbour), in 2021’s Black Widow, whose flashbacks revealed that both Widows’ childhoods included kidnapping, state-sanctioned human trafficking, parents willfully turning their kids into brainwashed assassins, and more wacky Russian accents than a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

In other words: Yelena has every right to feel lonely and depressed as Thunderbolts* begins. Red Guardian tells her to stop working for amoral spy Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), but Yelena accepts one last job on the condition that when it’s over, Val will help her transition to a more outwardly heroic career path. (The fact that killers for hire might feel as creatively unfulfilled in their day jobs as the rest of us is one of the film’s drier running gags.)

Of course, no one in the history of cinema has ever successfully pulled off “one last job.” Sure enough, when Yelena shows up for her final assignment at a top-secret underground vault, she encounters numerous other mercenary types grappling with their own issues. That includes Wyatt Russell’s disgraced former Captain America, Hannah John-Kamen’s ethereal assassin Ghost, and Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster, who can mimic any fighting style she sees.

This motley brigade then discovers a mysterious man named Bob (Lewis Pullman), who has no idea where he is or how he got there. Between bouts of amnesia, Bob seems to possess incredible powers, and all sorts of strange things happen when the other characters touch him.  Pretty soon, they’re all running for their lives while collectively sorting through their deep-seated mental anguish.

Everyone but Bob has a very similar power set — they’re all very good at punching, kicking, and shooting people. While a team comprised of five or six people with identical abilities might sound a little boring, it actually works in Thunderbolts*’s favor. The movie never gets too bogged down in computer effects and the scale of the action never gets too overblown.

More grounded heroes also means more old-school action, with lots of cool flips and MMA throws — as in the first meeting between Yelena and the rest of the Thunderbolts, which quickly escalates into a chaotic four-way fight. On a practical level, you would never assemble a team of heroes where everyone can do the exact same things. But then, the Thunderbolts aren’t purposefully assembled as a team of heroes; they’re just a bunch of lonely weirdos who wind up in the same bad predicament together.

The only weak link in the group — and in the film — is one of my favorite long-running Marvel characters: Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, a former Avenger with plenty of deep-rooted trauma of his own. (You don’t get to be an immortal super-soldier who spent decades working as a programmable killer for a terrorist organization without a few skeletons in your closet.) For reasons Thunderbolts* never explains (and Bucky himself seems pretty unclear about), the former Winter Soldier is now a first-term U.S. Congressman from Brooklyn. Early scenes establish Bucky’s interest in Valentina, who is embroiled in a vaguely defined scandal and faces impeachment from her post as director of the CIA.

There’s a little talk about some bombshell evidence that could destroy Val’s reputation and remove her from power, but then the movie essentially drops that story (along with any notion of contemporary political commentary) and just has Bucky turn back into a full-fledged superhero. (The notion of an elected official carrying out extrajudicial killings with a group of vigilantes is also not given a moment’s consideration either.)

Bucky worked through his own mishegoss in prior Marvel films, which lets him offer advice to the rest of the Thunderbolts about seeking out redemption instead of running away from your problems — a fact that just serves to underscore how out of place he feels in the group. Mostly it seems like someone at Marvel Studios felt this project could use a Marvel veteran to pump up the star power, and who is more of a veteran than a 100-year-old former hit man with a robot arm?

As Yelena searches for her life’s purpose early in the film, she pointedly asks Red Guardian “What is the point in any of this?” Longtime Marvel fans who suffered through Eternals and Secret Invasion can relate to that sentiment. Thunderbolts* is a nice reminder of what this company is capable of at its best. It looks good, it sounds good, and it really does turn its protagonist’s pain into an effective allegory about rejecting despair and apathy in favor of action and brotherhood. Hopefully the studio carries this creative momentum into The Fantastic Four and the new Avengers sequels. It would be a real tragedy if they didn’t.

Additional Thoughts:

-Yes, the asterisk in Thunderbolts* is present onscreen, and yes, it is explained by the end of the film.

-I have already read people comparing the Thunderbolts to DC’s Suicide Squad. I think it’s worth noting, though, that as much as those teams (and their films) operate in a similar fashion, the superhero movie Marvel is really cribbing from here is their own Guardians of the Galaxy, another story about a team of criminals outcasts burdened by awful pasts thrown together by chance who realize that together they have an opportunity to help others and heal their own wounds by defeating a villain of unimaginable power. There’s no talking tree in Thunderbolts*, but otherwise they are darn close.

RATING: 7/10